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THEIR DAY IN COURT 



QBJ^GB) 



THEIR DAY IN COURT 



BY 
PERCIVAL POLLARD 




NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON 
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1909 






Copyright, 1909, by 
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY 



©CI. 



nt 



CONTENTS 
PART ONE 

PAGE 

Women, Womanists and Manners .... 17 

PART TWO 

Men and Manners 145 

PART THREE 
Criticism 271 



i 



THEIR DAY IN COURT 



INTRODUCTION 

Wearied alike of the sea and the consciousness of her 
own sophistication, the fairest of all readers dropped her 
book on the deck. 

The man beside her picked it up. 

" An old one? " he said. " As old as— that? " 

"Why not?" 

" There are so many new ones." 

" So many, yes ; but new, no." 

" You think they can all say, with the returning spirits 
of men : ' We have been here before ' ? " 

" Precisely." 

" There remains," he smiled, " the Marconigram for the 
day. Shall I get it for you? " 

" Not for — oceans ! If there is one thing more unorig- 
inal than our literature it is our newspapers." 

Whereupon he left her still staring, sophisticated and 
therefore sad, into the sea, while he communed with him- 
self upon the melancholy case of those who know so much 
of literature as it is in covers that they cannot find the 
literature that is in the life about them. 

For to those who have eyes and minds to see, the pass- 
ing hours present such stuff as makes ridiculous the pov- 
erty of invention in our modern authors. 

One lady of our Central Park Faubourg may choose 
to exercise her prose and our patience by Jacobite imi- 
tations ; this author may re-write the works of Mile, de 
la Ramee, substituting chauffeurs for guardsmen ; and 
other wordmongering opportunists may re-tell all the 
sagas of the vikings with money-bags taking the place of 
brawn. Granted that all this may make for some disgust, 
yet we should by no means despair. Invention may dry in 



10 INTRODUCTION 

those whose metier invention should be ; still is life daily, 
hourly, coining such material as more than makes up for 
the fountains that are drained. 

The plots, so the tired folk tell us, were all used long 
ago ; we may find novel variants ; nothing more. There 
are only so many stories in the world, and most of them 
unfit to print. And they throw down upon the deck, or 
the desk, or the drawing-room floor, the disgusting inep- 
titude of the moment. 

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the Man in the 
Street, if only he knew it, may enjoy from the vari- 
colored life of our town and our time, the most wonderful 
of literary entertainments. Always, if one would keep 
one's balance in the world, one must bear in mind that 
Man in the Street. The moment one shuts the door 
against him, in any of the arts, one enters a shut cham- 
ber, where nothing real can long live, and where one must 
oneself, sooner or later, die the living death of the scho- 
liast, the theorist or the mere mechanician. You may 
safely let go, perhaps, both the simple life and the sim- 
ple spelling, the more so as they become shibboleths and 
so lose their simplicity ; but you cannot safely let go the 
Man in the Street. If you do let him go, he finds you 
out soon enough ; it is not your literature that will sat- 
isfy him then; it is only life itself, the life from which 
your closet-door has shut you. 

" Literature," says the small mind that is not yet out 
of the shibboleth stage, " is my life." When that small 
mind begins to grow, if ever it does, it finds out that 
literature, especially to the specialist therein, must, to be 
at its grandest, play but a tiny role in the cosmic Scheme. 

The great masters in all the arts have so builded that 
in their lives the details of paint, of rhyme, of prose, of 
tone, have been — but details. 

We must all, if we would be worth anything more than 
the hissing of froth in a pot, look upon life in the large, 
upon art in the little. In having, however, unconsciously, 



INTRODUCTION 11 

that large unthinking outlook, the Man in the Street is 
vastly better off, vastly more fitted to pass judgment, 
than is the horde of petty pessimists who at times bewail 
the unoriginality of all things written. 

Looking always on the present, as oblivious of the 
past as is his newspaper, the Man in the Street finds 
daily the most stimulating feast of Things that Happen. 
It is in the things that happen — ay, and even in those 
chronicles of them, the newspapers — that we may find, 
with the Man in the Street, the optimism of which our 
hours spent with printed books may have deprived us. 

Where, on what shelf bearing the confessions of Jean 
Jacques, of Marie Bashkirtseff, of Prosper Merimee's Un- 
known, of the Portuguese Nun, or even of George Moore, 
will you find anything more poignant than the letters of 
" Billy Brown " ? This was a young girl in the State 
of New York whose lover was convicted, some years ago, 
of having drowned her; if you have already forgotten 
those letters it is proof that you do not know literature 
when you see it. What Flaubert ever surpassed the story 
of Evelyn Thaw? To discover that soul would surely 
have taken a still greater microscopist than the author 
of Emma Bovary. To the Man in the Street, in this 
town and that, both these were figures so typical, so real, 
that he knew them as we know an old hat. There they 
were : shapes of real life, that one could see and hear and 
touch. Familiarity breeds no contempt in the more prim- 
itive of us ; about lives so familiar as these the Man in 
the Street finds their very nearness the most efficacious 
glamour. 

If we decry the stories of this sort as just common, 
every-day stories of the town, we deny, so doing, our own 
sense of humanity. Such stories, such lives, are to the 
forms of literature what some slang phrases are to lan- 
guage, the vitalising elements. If literature really de- 
pended on the sterile inventive faculties of professional 
authors, it would indeed be in poor case. Minimize the 



12 INTRODUCTION 

melodramatic as the most timid or the most artistically 
sophisticated of us will, in real life things do happen, and 
in real life also, despite the bewildering verbiage of the 
newspapers, things do get written. 

Common stories of the town, you say again, — you, 
sophisticated ones, on sea or land — and you say they are 
as old as are womankind and mankind. True, exactly 
true; the womankind and the mankind that jostle us 
hourly are what, if we be human rather than divine, must 
interest us more vitally than any other womankind or 
mankind in any other space of time. 

It is only as we are human that we can have interest 
for men or for gods. 

If I venture to believe that the general reader may 
find interest in this book, which is to be chiefly about 
literature, it is because I know that my being a critic 
has never prevented my being human. Unfalteringly 
mine has been the attitude of one human being discuss- 
ing the humanities with other human beings. If you 
prefer scholastic utterances from the closet, this is not 
the book for you. A critical career that has surveyed 
the printed wheat and chaff of a score or so of years 
has not driven me to either the closet or the cloister; it 
is too late to begin the grand Olympian manner ; for that 
you must go elsewhere. 

To have conserved one's humanity throughout a con- 
siderable critical activity is surely somethng of an 
achievement. Humanity has meant for me optimism, and 
optimism so impatient of aught save the best that the 
thoughtless will probably call it pessimism. You will have 
plenty of opportunity, in the following pages, to decide 
for yourself. What I am now concerned about driving 
home to you is that this candid statement of much that 
is wrong with American literature is by one who has its 
welfare at heart, one who, in his warfare against things 
as they are, has always fought in the open, one who pre- 



INTRODUCTION 13 

tends to no sort of distinction save that of being able to 
see clearly and of not being afraid to speak boldly. 

You may see, in these pages, many blows struck. All 
of them will have seemed deserved, and all meant right 
heartily. My enemies were made long ago ; if this book 
do nothing else than assure them of my continuing dis- 
esteem it will have achieved a success that I shall not de- 
spise. Temperamentally I have never been able to dis- 
tinguish the murder from the murderer; denouncing a 
crime against literature has never seemed to me so effica- 
cious, or so honest, as denouncing the criminal. If I 
seem peculiar in that viewpoint, it is because a majority 
of our critics have been too fond of compromise, too time- 
serving, to keep the general public on anything like fa- 
miliar terms with the truth. It is the truth you will find 
in this book, as I see it. To many men many different 
things are represented by the word truth; I do not pre- 
tend for a moment to give you your notion of truth, or 
even an abstract, impersonal notion of it. For this, above 
all else, you are to remember, if you are to come with 
me at all, on the critical excursion that follows : these are 
my personal impressions. They pretend to nothing else. 
If you want the fine impersonal attitude, this is not the 
shop for you; you will find plenty of others to supply 
the article. As you will find hereinafter set forth more 
explicitly, my theory and practice of critisism have never 
found the slightest value in what was not an individual 
expression of an individual opinion. 

You will find out, soon enough, whether behind these 
personal opinions of mine there is such personality as to 
justify my labor in writing and your patience in reading 
this book. It has seemed to be worth doing because it 
is something that nobody else has thought fit to do ; the 
generally accepted critical attitude is the complacent one 
that avers all to be well with the world and supposes none 
to be fool enough either to doubt or to cavil. If the sug- 
gestion that the book be one with a purpose is like to 



14 INTRODUCTION 

frighten you off, let me hasten to assure you that it has 
no other purpose than that of recording a critical career 
that has led neither to riches nor to fame, but has left 
me with my eyes and my enthusiasm still open, my hu- 
manity still unsoured. There will be many indictments 
brought, many idols shaken. You are quite at liberty to 
say that these are evidently the frothings of a failure; 
you may fling phrases at me, teaching that criticism is 
the last resort of impotent aspirations ; you shall by noth- 
ing diminish the esteem in which I hold myself. Who else 
should hold me in esteem if I despise myself? Were we 
not talking of Truth? Let us lay our cards on the table 
then ; what the points on my cards tell is that these are 
my personal impressions, put before you as vividily as 
possible, for you to take or to leave. 

I mean to put as clearly as possible what seem to me 
the Case of American Letters and its Causes. The con- 
clusions have been reached after a good many years of 
uninterrupted work in critical survey of current letters. 
To point the argument it has often been necessary to 
invade the field of Letters in England, and even in 
tongues other than English; but throughout these pages 
the central theme is never lost sight of. That same cen- 
tral theme, harboring an honest belief in the decent wel- 
fare of Literature in America, has ever been mine in the 
contributions I have made in years past to our critical 
periodicals. What is perishable in a periodical, however, 
need not be so in a book ; so, believing in the greater 
permanence possible to these present pages, I am taking 
such pains in preparing my reader now as I never thought 
fit to take in all the years that I have been writing, 
mostly anonymously, for the reviews. Into the heart of 
my contention the reader can plunge soon enough, what I 
wish to prepare him about is the sort of person the con- 
tender is. 

Upon the process of the birth or manufacture of poets 
you shall learn nothing from me, since there is little poetic 



INTRODUCTION 15 

in me, save perhaps a youthfulness that is an unconscion- 
able time a-dying. Nor can I inform you about the gen- 
erality of critics, whether born or made, whether like 
Topsy a growth, or like tenors a disease. My own criti- 
cal concerns are quite enough trouble to me. I foresee 
plenty of opportunities for leading the reader into by- 
paths of personality, of anecdote and experience other 
than literary ; time enough for all that ; time, now and 
here, only to insist that, just as no man is altogether 
bad, so is he not always a critic, nor ever exclusively a 
critic. Even a critic may live in the philosophy of Can- 
dide, and, as each year passes, interpret " II faut cultiver 
notre jar din " more and more literally ; yet the dunces 
of our day need not take heart too blithely, since such 
critic can easily stop pruning a Malmaison and take to 
cudgeling their maladroitness. 

Enough of perorating. If you care for personal im- 
pressionism, for a hearty prejudice or so, and even for 
a little passion, you may find something to interest you. 
If you believe in the impersonal attitude toward litera- 
ture, and if you are fond of academic standards, I would 
bid you good-day; we are not of the same kidney; you 
would not read me if I cajoled you until Doomsday. 

Let us get to our Case. 



PART ONE 
WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 



CHAPTER ONE 

The case of pure literature in America is comparable 
to the case of My Lady Parvenu's grand rout: crowded 
and worthless. Quality is utterly sacrificed for quantity. 
The rout comprises everybody, which to the discriminat- 
ing spells Nobody. The finer sort, accidentally coming 
upon these scenes, must needs murmur : " Bounders, out- 
siders — no class ! " and proceed elsewhither. The snob 
may utter that remark too loud, and, so doing, lessen its 
force; yet even that shoddy preciosity may have its 
merits, for it at least tries to imitate the finer example, 
not the example in mere multiplication. 

The ambition in both cases lies sheerly toward vast 
figures. In the one case it is desired to state that so 
many hundred covers were laid, and so many dollars spent 
on favors ; in the other all details are subservient to the 
purely commercial one of the number of books sold in a 
week, a month, a year. So many millions of dollars were 
represented at My Lady's rout; so many thousands of 
this or that novel were sold in such and such a period 
and place. Before the advance of commercialism all else 
retreats. Birth and breeding in the one case ; style, work- 
manship and originality in the other. How often is it 
the quality, to use that word most narrowly, of our most 
notorious books that we hear discussed? If we do hear 
books talked of, how often is not such talk the pure 
parrot chatter of those who think merely the thoughts of 
others? If one hears literature talked of at all, is it not 
mostly in terms of mathematics? 

" Jones," we hear, " has built a ten- thousand-dollar 
cottage from the profits on his new serial." Or, " That 
new thing of Brown's has gone into six figures." 

19 



20 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

It was by no means always thus. Let us not deny the 
material progress we have made. The change has come 
in the last decade; history will have to note the fact 
that not until after the war with Spain did American 
literature, still thinking only in terms of the material, 
throw away entirely the leading strings that had been 
held in England. Year after year, before that, we saw 
the same thing happening, the dreary successions of im- 
ported fame, and nothing save foreign writings on our 
literary bargain counters. Year after year our writers 
seemed only to clutch the edges and fringes of anything 
ever so remotely resembling success. There was a suc- 
cess of esteem here and there, perhaps ; in thinking back 
to that past decade I recall some bright moments amid 
the gloom ; but the public — the great surging, half- 
educated public, that likes to parade its occasional ac- 
quaintance with the names of books and plays only to 
ape an appearance of intellectual sprightliness — the great 

American public mostly contented itself with reading 
novels bearino- the hall-mark Made in Eno-land. Long 
and justly that supercilious question, "Who reads an 
American book? " rankled unanswerable. Time was when 
the annual count of books produced in our language 
showed England first, America a bad second. 

Those times are no more. 

'Arrogant islanders no longer ask their hateful ques- 
tion. We write, we print, we read, at a devouringly pros- 
perous rate. Never before has our renublic of letters 
been so prosperous. Dollars are plentiful. Publishers 
build houses, and authors are Permitted to spread rumors 
of having built cottages. The presses jrroan as never 
thev did before — even machinprv, one opines, may have 
its limits in silent patience. Libraries grow merrilv where 
once naught flourished save the ravening morto-a^e. 
Though literature may not yet. be a subiect for general 
conversation as are -politics, crime and the theatre, vet 
it is not to be denied, still keeping grimly to the mathe- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 21 

matics of the case, that more American books are writ- 
ten, more American books are read to-day than ever be- 
fore. Indeed, if our tendency toward quantity increase 
at the prevailing rate, the English publishers will have 
to reverse the habits of other years, and turn to America 
for grist to supply their mills. 

The mills of the gods, we are often told, grind slowly. 
Our publishers, then, cannot be accounted godlike, for 
their mills run mostly to speed and quantity. There are 
other essentials in which publishers differ from the gods, 
a difference that might afford some sombre student, of 
the industrious and melancholy cast, say, of the late 
George Gissing, material for a tragic fiction to be enti- 
tled " The Gulf." For the present purpose, however, it 
suffices to insist on the already stated difference between 
the mills of the gods and the mills of the publishers. 
The speed and the output of the latter increase annually. 
There must be no stopping of the wheels ; always it must 
be possible to cry out in public the name of a book that, 
whatever its quality, is indubitably the newest. Scarcely 
is one novel become what is called the rage before another 
crowds it out of the public memory. 

If, in the present argument, mere -fiction, the mere novel, 
seem insisted on to the exclusion of other forms of litera- 
ture, that is because the period we live in has allowed 
poetry and such prose as is not fiction to remain wofully 
subordinate. Publishers, press-agents and the public have 
vied with one another in spreading the superstition that 
" a booh " means only " a novel." 

Considered commercially, as one considers the growing 
output of steel, or coal, or cotton, our tendency toward 
printing the most books in the world may have its merits. 
A great many more printers are doubtless earning a pre- 
sumably honest — it all depends on the point of view — 
living than before ; the rate at which our forests are dis- 
appearing to feed the paper-mills and the printing- 
presses is measurably accelerated; and there must needs 



22 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

be a constantly growing demand for spectacles, a fine 
thing for the opticians and oculists. No matter how 
coarse the chaff, it is grist for some mill or other. The 
art of literature may be suffering, but a number of trades 
and professions are gaining; in the general computation, 
then, you ask, should not something be written on the 
profit side? 

I leave that to the economists. It is literature that is 
at stake ; the fine, fat figures of commerce have nothing 
to do with literature. Our growth is sheerly a matter for 
statistics. One might as well argue that because of an 
increased birth-rate we were a more cultured people. To 
accept the specious arguments of the booksellers would 
be equivalent to admitting the superior wisdom of the 
negro and the rabbit. Prosperous publishing seasons no 
more imply artistic progress in our literature than do 
good theatrical years, from the box-office viewpoint, nec- 
essarily mean advance in dramatic technics or originality. 
If the statistics of the publishers and the booksellers mark 
an increased volume of volumes, that increase deserves 
record only as does the increase in crime or railway acci- 
dents — mere mathematics. The persons who argue other- 
wise — the marketmen of letters — forget that in literature 
bulk and permanence have nothing in common. 

The literature of an age, a decade, or a year, is to 
be judged only by the verdict of posterity. And pos- 
terity is vastly scornful of aught that lacks the saving 
grace of quality. The circulation figures of a hundred 
years ago touch us now not at all ; out of the popular- 
ities of that period nothing remains that had not the con- 
serving salt of true art. 

Of quality, of arresting genius, of fine technic, what 
do we find in our contemporary letters? Consider the 
successes of recent years, the titles most talked about, 
the authors most mispronounced in the parlor-cars : where 
will these be when posterity applies its test? In fiction, 
in poetry, in essays, what have we accomplished? Have 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 23 

we even a tendency that deserves the name? Have we 
the warfare of rival schools, rival professors of technic, 
competing methods in the art? 

In other years, with the Prosperity flag not yet so 
flaunted in the breeze, with our cousins overseas still 
sneering their famed conundrum, " Who reads an Amer- 
ican book? " we had at least the storm and stress of 
skirmishes between realism and impressionism, naturalism 
and romanticism. Now, not even that. A youthful sick- 
ness cured, you say? Wrong! Rivalry on details of art 
can never harm an art; only when all other concerns are 
merged in the commercial is the future indeed black. 

Find me, if you can, any tendency in our letters save 
the commercial! Show me any goal save the dollar! 

It is true, of course, that literature as a profession 
appears no longer what it was when Stevenson wrote his 
memorable Letter to a Young Gentleman. It is now quite 
possible for the ambitious youth to step from any walk 
of life and, given a certain amount of luck and a Jesuitic 
conscience, to achieve as decent financial success in let- 
ters as the counting-house or the corner grocery offer. 
The rewards are undeniably greater and more general 
than they were. Nothing seems in store for our Ameri- 
can writers save prosperity and happiness. The two are 
synonymous, are they not? Well, for most folk they 
are; and the world is colored, after all, very largely by 
what " most folk " think. Yet it is possible to conceive 
some of our authors, however prosperous, as not happy. 
Pleasant enough it may be to achieve a modest prosperity 
in the shadow of the publisher's greater one ; to be listed 
as " among those present " at this or that watering- 
place, or aboard this or that fashionable ocean-liner side 
by side with prominent magnates, merchants and their 
ladies ; yet, given a conscience still loyal to any ever so 
slight ideal of literary art, there must surely be some 
unpleasant moments. Moments in which the mediocrity 
the public is willing to praise brings a feeling of dis- 



M THEIR DAY IN COURT 

taste; moments in which the impermanence of to-day's 
reputation insists on being realized. Moments in which 
the rottenness of the whole fabric becomes visible through 
the varnish of prosperity. 

Once there was the notion that the true poet must live 
in a garret before the Muse would favor him ; to-day, in 
face of the prosperity to be achieved by merely supply- 
ing a demand, it would be quixotic, would it not, to in- 
quire further? Why bother oneself as to the nature of 
the goods demanded? If the demand is there, the thing 
to do, surely, is to supply it, even if that means culti- 
vating literature on a little terrapin in a Central Park 
mansion. There, at any rate, is the gate of decision. If 
we really possess, here in America, authors capable of 
producing quality as well as quantity, it is simply a 
question which path they will choose. In the general 
reckoning, the reckoning by statistics, the decision may 
not matter much ; the wave of prosperity, the commercial 
conquests bearing our imprints, will roll on as surely, 
whether or not the detail of quality be regarded. Yet, 
in the long run to fame rather than to notoriety, it might 
be worth our authors' while to try for quality, to lend 
our vast productiveness the virtues of high and noble art. 

The true artists rarely swim with the tide. While some 
authors taste apparent contemporary success and roll in 
actual prosperity, the bread and butter of others, quite 
as accomplished craftsmen, comes by the practice of such 
writing as, strictly, is not literature at all. Despite the 
rumor of prosperity that publishers find it profitable to 
distribute, our most prominent men of letters — I use the 
popular currency, though these prominent ones are not 
what I consider worthy banner-bearers ! — do not make 
both ends meet by literature alone. 

The greatest man of letters I know is also the most 
desperately pessimistic. The most enthusiastic optimist 
on the subject of literature in my acquaintance is a pub- 
lisher's salesman ; I presume he is paid by commission. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 25 

Quantity, not quality, is what we worship ; I cannot 
often enough repeat that. With the publishers it is a 
race to offer the greatest quantity of newest books. With 
the public it is a race to read the newest just a trifle 
more speedily than their neighbors. The national tem- 
perament, with its tendencies away from conservatism, 
from allegiance to ascertained merit, its pursuits of con- 
stantly changing wills-o-the-wisp, must bear some of the 
blame. The author, making hay while the sun shines, is 
willing to produce at a rate that cannot possibly have 
anything to do with permanent literature. The blame 
lies between all parties : publisher, public and author. 

It is impossible, we have been told, to indict a nation. 
The impossible, then, the indictment of all those respon- 
sible for the fatal prosperity of letters among us, I will 
not attempt. Yet to accuse, by chapter and verse, the 
two classes most directly responsible, this book is written. 

Those classes are: 

Firstly, the Ladies. 

Secondly, the Critics. 

It is while these were the paramount factors that the 
plague of book production most devoured our continent. 
That plague in no wise improved the grammar of the 
American people as it falls upon our ears ; I know of 
no surer test to prove culture, education, true or shoddy. 
Our plain people — their plainness including both the plu- 
tocrat and the pauper — still continue in blithesome use of 
such turns as : " Was you to the beach yesterday ? " 
and " I thought I seen you there." 

For this, we may thank the ladies and the critics. 

Before I make way for the ladies, who have done so 
much for our artistic stature, and to whom I shall pres- 
ently offer my meed of appreciation, let me remark upon 
the phenomenon that the ladies could never have so 
blessed us if we had ever had critics deserving the name. 
In their campaign of commercialism the publishers have 
consciously or unconsciously suppressed the critic; they 



26 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

have coddled a breed of reviewer who conceives his mis- 
sion as that of the barker at Coney Island, rather than 
as an austere keeper of the Gate of Letters. In the last 
decade or so American publishers have reached a point 
where they can treat criticism as if it did not exist. The} r 
prepare their own " reviews," and "via the newspapers the 
public swallow them. They go, at any rate, through the 
form of swallowing, do our readers ; but have they really 
been deceived? I wonder. 

Were there any recognized criticism of letters in 
America, would it not be possible to name the critics? In 
a period that has seen and read Matthew Arnold, Walter 
Pater, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, Wal- 
ter Lord, Andrew Lang, Arthur Symons, and as many 
more, who have been our American critics? Have we, to- 
day, any critics, of acknowledged and deserved eminence? 

Writing about another art, Henry James once declared 
that a society has to be old before it becomes critical. 
Superficially that seems just and pertinent. But it hap- 
pens that in a much earlier day than the present we had 
some American critics who were considerable in their day 
and memorable thereafter. The entire New England 
group was of the critic tribe, and is still famous ; Poe 
was a critic. So that argument fails. The simple truth 
is that there has been, apparently there is, no man strong 
enough, fortunate enough, to withstand the full force of 
the commercialism that is exerted against him the moment 
he makes it evident he means to be a critic, not a lobbyist. 
In this place one need only hint at the methods of the 
commercial cabal (time enough to come to actual in- 
stances later) : the hitting at the critic through the ad- 
vertising department of the periodical he uses ; the inva- 
riable editorial surrender to the dollar-worship of the 
counting-house ; these are the A B C's of the case. 

One man who in my time actually tried the old grand 
manner, whose genius forbade his working in criticism of 
any sort save the sturdy and honest expression of him- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 27 

self, died of it before his time. His name was Walter 
Blackburn Harte. I dare say you never heard of it ; 
never mind: you will, if you read this book. He had the 
large survey, the incisive phrase, the relentless courage of 
some of the critical gladiators of old; but he lacked— 
natural corollary — the subserviency that would insure him 
his avenue to print in the large manner, so he gave up 
the criticism that was his life, and drooped to journalism, 
which was his death. He was quite useless at it, and died 
of it as surely as others die of typhoid. 

A literature without critics is like a park without a 
gate. All the tramps and all the vermin can get in, and 
presently the proper denizens of the park wish nothing 
better than to be somewhere else. Our literature is long 
past the infant industry stage. If commercial success 
prove nothing else, it at least proves that. The dollar 
reigns supreme. The ambitious amateur author can even 
purchase the semblance of success, if he have dollars 
enough ; the publisher and the spineless critic are both 
anxious to please him. So the gate stands wide open, 
and all the fools may enter. What is needed at the gate 
is a club. You may aver that a critical, mental oligarchy 
carries danger of misuse ; that critics wielding actual 
power should be honest as well as clever, and that the 
combination is rare. Perhaps ; yet between the two evils, 
a critic with a prejudice to feed, and a publisher with a 
purse to fill, the former is the lesser. At present we are 
under the dominance of the latter, untrammeled, trium- 
phant: the publisher and the petticoat. 

Between them, the publisher and the petticoat keep 
our literature headed for nothing save dollars. Art for 
art's sake may be an absurd shibboleth; yet it is not so 
damnable as art for dollars' sake, unrelieved by other aim 
or ambition. 

One would be glad to find in our letters a different 
drift, a finer tendency. If this book arouses contention, 
if one can be convinced that one's fears are not true, it 



m 



THEIR DAY IN COURT 



will have accomplished no little. I am open to convic- 
tion, but it does not seem to me as if there were, on our 
side of the Atlantic, any longer such a thing as the art 
of letters ; it is merely a trade. 

For all of which, we may thank the ladies and the 
critics. 

Under " ladies " I would include those writers who, by 
nature of the male sex, are yet in their art what by an 
ingenious meiosis we call feminists. 

Under critics must be included the newspapers. 



CHAPTER TWO 

As long as we have with us the ladies — God bless 'em ! 
— as we said in more courteous and toasting days, we 
need never fear that the general reading public will not 
eventually have all the little mysteries of human life ex- 
plained. Will you bear patiently a rambling discourse 
upon some of the work that the ladies, on both sides of 
the Atlantic, have given us in a period that has been 
described as " the age of the woman novelist"? Taking 
a novel here, another there; burrowing about in the rub- 
bish heaps of the present generation, you may come to 
some conclusion concerning the share the ladies have had 
in our sentimental education. Such survey need not pre- 
tend to be anything other than haphazard; it may still 
prove its point. 

While most of the extremes reached in the erotic were 
achieved by writers reckoned English, we must by no 
means forget that at about the period that Bourget's 
" Physiology of Modern Love " was being discussed by 
the disciples of Plato everywhere, Amelie Rives astounded 
our readers with " The Quick and the Dead." That reve- 
lation of what a woman could do in writing her sex down 
for the general inspection has never, as to essentials, been 
surpassed; but there have been some very determined 
efforts made. 

Let me remind you of the story by Erank Danby called 
" Baccarat." 

Some things there are, despite any advance in frank- 
ness that we may be supposed to have made since the 
days of Thackeray's lament, that mere men still consider 
as without the range of literature. But, say the ladies, 



30 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

a pest on this reticence! Whatever is human is also fit 
for human consideration, to say nothing of individual 
profit. It is all in the treatment. And the ladies — again 
a toast, if you please! — do know the delicate methods so 
exquisitely ! They prove that our reticence has been a 
mixture of cowardice and clumsiness. So they advance 
upon the hitherto secreted corners of our houses. Each 
corner of the bedroom is robbed of its mystery, to say 
nothing of each crevice of the bed. I hesitate to men- 
tion the only apartment in the house that is so far unin- 
vaded in our petticoated literature; I shudder to think 
how short the time before that, too, is a tale that is told. 
One wonders if the chief chorus on that day will be of 
envy that one did not do the thing oneself, or of admira- 
tion for the finesse with which the trick is accomplished. 
Surely, in this enlightened age, one should not condemn 
any effort to chronicle whatever is human. That were to 
impede artistic progress, to be ungallant to the ladies, 
and to deprive the public of its right to publicity. Have 
we not clamored for publicity about our Trusts? How 
in logic, then, shall we clamor against the ladies who 
offer to public inspection hitherto secreted intimacies? 

What Frank Danby showed us in " Baccarat " were 
the thoughts and physical sensations of a husband whose 
wife has been misled into what is politely termed a mis- 
step. 

We were shown the erring wife as she is actually com- 
mitting the error; we were all but placed on a level with 
those French " agents of morals " who have the fashion 
of opening the door upon the flagrant deliction itself. 
The lover plies the lady with wine ; he gets her into a 
condition where she hardly knows what she is doing — and, 
next day, he lunches with her. There followed some of 
the heroine's sensations. Having allowed her husband's 
proper place to be temporarily filled we learn that 
she: 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 31 

felt ill, desperately miserably ill, with her fevered tongue 
and cracked lips, and some horrible memory that she could 
not put away. She remembered, for instance, the night she 
had heard voices in the room next to hers. She had gone to 
the manager and said she could not sleep next to these people, 
he must give her another apartment. It was a shoot of 
agony, almost physical, when she remembered, when she 
wondered if the people next to her . . . 

Why had we never before described, in detail, the little 
scenes we so frequently see enacted in our palaces of lob- 
sters and ladies? Why have we not put into fiction the 
pleasant fellows who ply their damsels with drink in pub- 
lic places and disappear with them to private places? It 
was not until we read " Baccarat " that we realised what 
fine scenes those were for vivid elaboration. To describe 
the advance being made in the lady's intoxication, the 
exact temper of her sensations as she walked upstairs, the 
exact topography of the house itself, as, for instance, 
" their rooms were in the same corridor " — all this sort 
of thing had long been ready to our hands, yet rarely, 
outside of the divorce and criminal courts, had we used 
that fine material. 

Well, we know better now. The author of " Baccarat " 
gave us a seduction scene that must rank with some of 
the nicest things the ladies have ever done for us. There 
was that jolly little episode of the siren who seduced the 
gentleman without legs, Sir Richard Calmady ; admirable 
page ! yet not more admirable than the pages in " Bac- 
carat " in which we were made witnesses to a French 
croupier plying a wife with champagne .and then attach- 
ing horns to the head of her absent husband. 

All that, however, was mere preface. Merely a fore- 
taste of the fine things in store. Literature had given us 
other seductions. But the sensations of a husband, who, 
having forgiven his wife and left her lover alive, realises 
that his wife is in an interesting condition — had we had 
those sensations, to their lowest physical degree, set down 



32 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

for us before? In lay reading, not medical? The pres- 
ent critic has tried to keep pace with the literature of at 
least three languages for a fairish number of years, but 
the author of " Baccarat " seems a pioneer in this par- 
ticular. Where had we sensations like this before? 

What he saw was the spirit of the Belgian croupier foul- 
ing his home. He had impregnated the poor woman with 
his seed, and until she was free from it she was all deformed 
and tainted, and gradually grew horrible to him. . . . 
The air about her was tainted. Not by her, but by that 
which she carried. . . . The Belgian was out of his 
reach, but his seed was here and would soon burst into 
poisonous blossom. Julie would be released from that which 
was draining her life, this horrible tentacle thing that held 
her, and tortured her, but which must drop from her soon. 
. He saw now, always, and always more plainly, that 
yellow Belgian, who lived, and smiled his cursed smile, and 
knew what he knew. ... If her nightgown slipped, and 
the slender throat was exposed, and John would put his hand 
up to cover her, to care for her in momentary forgetfulness 
in a love that had not died, the stained fingers were there 
before him. . . . He could not separate her from the 
man who had been her lover. What had occurred between 

them? How was it ? . . . He would not father 

the bastard. 

Surely it is now obvious to you, if by mischance you 
had forgotten or never known, how delicately this author 
unveiled for us some of the mysteries of the bedchamber. 
Other authors had given us the sinning wife. Others, in 
story and play, had left the husband forgiving, in " Re- 
bellious Susan " and many another modern instance. But 
the physical sensations of the husband — no, we had shied 
at that revelation. Our impolite literature, not publicly 
circulated, told us long ago the sensations of a member 
of the oldest profession in the world ; but it was not until 
some time after " Baccarat " had opened the wa}' in po- 
lite letters — can a lady ever be other than polite? — that 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 33 

a German writer actually attempted the diary of a mem- 
ber of Mrs. Warren's Profession. So one must surely 
credit Frank Danby with having let down a barrier or 
two that had hitherto impeded the progress of art. 

If art spell one thing to you, another to me ; if you 
remind me that whatsoever is human must have interest 
for us; there is just this one retort to make: it is not the 
subject, it is the treatment that marks the work of art. 
Of all things abhorrent a puritanism that forbids men- 
tion of this subject or that in art seems the most dread- 
ful. 

It is only where the artist has offended deliberately 
against the laws of artistic treatment that the critic may 
justly condemn. " Baccarat " so offended. So did " Sir 
Richard Calmady." 

Don Juan with a hump was new neither in life nor 
letters. We all remember that Byron was a devil among 
the women. But the hero without legs, or at least with- 
out such portions of the legs as fall below the knee, doubt- 
less had his attractions for certain perverted types of 
mind and body. 

These are not matters that one considers at great 
length if one's taste be of the nicest. That the abnormal 
exerts a charm in some circumstances ; that this charm 
can be explained in terms of the medics, one need not dis- 
pute about these things in places other than medical. 

Lucas Malet, however, in writing " Sir Richard Cal- 
mady " deliberately chose to drag from the world med- 
ical a subject that she determined her readers were to 
accept as polite literature. It was as if she wished to 
remind us that too great politeness, too much nicety, had 
their touches of the emasculate ; she bade us be bold, scorn 
the polite, and listen to the truth, even as she saw it; 
she bade us see life whole, even if we had to see its heroes 
without legs. 

Never for a moment was Sir Richard Calmady as much 



34 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

a creature of flesh and blood as were Richard the Third, 
Lord Byron, or even Rigoletto. From the moment when 
his deformity results from his mother having seen the 
father, maimed, on his deathbed, he is fantastic and im- 
probable. As to whether he was even possible, doctors 
differ. The author of the book is a woman, and one 
hates to keep a woman to accuracy, but if she had to 
meddle with these medical matters — well, the fact is, Lady 
Calmady's condition was such that when she saw her 
husband's shorn limbs she was already long past the 
time when it could have affected the unborn heir within 
her. But let us not linger with the possible ; that makes 
for disenchantment. Let us to other matters. Of all 
the matters, men and women, in the history of " Sir Rich- 
ard Calmady," what was more typical of the sort of book 
it is, of the sort of person who wrote it, of the whole 
tribe, indeed, of women novelists of that period, than the 
character of Helen de Vallorbes? 

Only a woman could have pictured Helen de Vallorbes. 

She is typical of what women have contributed to Eng- 
lish fiction. Some of these contributions lead most viv- 
idly to that puzzling paradox : in a period dominated by 
the puritanism of the Young Person, and by the namby- 
pamby, the ladylike, we had the curious spectacle of mem- 
bers of the dominant sex — one can never assert often 
enough that American art is essentially feminine — supply- 
ing the most prurient pages that came to us. 

But let us not keep Helen de Vallorbes waiting. 

She had hair of the color of heather honey-comb, and 
she was given to wearing gowns like the sea. Beware of 
these women that mingle honey and sea-tints ! Helen 
played the very devil with her cousin, Richard Calmady, 
that much is certain. Sometimes her gowns were sea- 
green, again they were sea-blue. But always as the sea. 
And as the swimmer plunges into the sea, so did men 
plunge — but hold, one must not imitate too closely the 
passionate prose of the author of " Sir Richard Calmady." 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 35 

Yet one cannot describe Helen if one does not use, ver- 
batim, a little of that same passionate prose, 

Helen had her contrasts. There is no mistaking her 
sex, nor that of her author. Has anyone pointed out 
the touch of Irish that is in all women? If not, behold it 
done! Yes, Helen had her contrasts. At first, when 
Richard was an innocent boy, not yet embittered to the 
point where, as came later, he went about the world sip- 
ping all its vices and its honey — other than the Helen 
brand — Helen was " a something ravishing, so that you 
wanted to draw it very close, hold it, devour it," " a 
something clear, simple and natural, as the sunlight, and 
yet infinitely subtle." Later the author threw the veil 
a good deal farther back, thus : " Helen de Vallorbes 
had the fine aesthetic appreciations, as well as the inevit- 
able animality of the great courtesan. The artist was at 
least as present in her as the " 

The word that gives me pause is one found often 
enough in the Bible and in current masculine speech of 
the ruder sort; but it was rather startling in a polite 
novel. You see, our writers of the sex miscalled gentle 
mince nothing nowadays; their spades are not only 
spades, but dirty spades. 

The fact that women have chosen rank subjects is no 
matter; all subjects are food for the great artist. What 
matters is that they have written inartistically. 

Contradictory and incoherent as is the portrait of 
Helen in this book, she remains its dominant figure. She 
was so sheerly animal, and her passion, made up of per- 
verted sexualism and of revenge, was such an utter abom- 
ination, that her share in the book was the measure of 
the progress made in literary license at the opening of 
the twentieth century. One could fancy nothing more 
appealing to the passions of perverted men and women 
than the two scenes in which Helen, so aptly described 
as " ravishing," feeds her appetites in the case of her 
cousin. 



36 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

She chose, for these occasions, always her garments 
that shimmered like the sea. Upon these details the au- 
thor dwells in complete rapture; one finds the like no- 
where else in English literature. If that be distinction, 
Lucas Malet may well claim it. These things had been 
done brutally, perhaps, in forthright, frank terms that 
shocked; but never before in loving, lingering phrases 
likely to corrupt wheresoever they fell. There were two 
of these scenes in which Helen lived up to her " ravishing " 
quality, in the most active sense. In the first she only 
approached success ; in the second, she tasted it. Observe 
the first situation : 

" Helen de Vallorbes, clothed in a flowing, yet clinging 
silken garment of turquoise, shot with blue purple and 
shimmering glaucous green . . . knelt upon the 
tigerskin before the dancing fire. . . ." 

Tigerskins and clinging garments, — how our ladies love 
them. The ladies who play passion on the stage ; the ladies 
who have passion to sell in any form, in print, in play, 
or in the flesh! How they do love those conventional 
stage settings ! They don't mind how much they repeat 
what is hackneyed, nor even how much they repeat — one 
another. For note : five years after Lucas Malet had given 
us that description begun above, with its " clinging silken 
garment of turquoise," its " tigerskin before the dancing 
fire," Elinor Glyn was to write, in a book that, while too 
fine in its art to be critically reviled, yet reached a vogue 
that was somewhat absurd, this : 

" In front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his 
tiger — and on him — also at full length — reclined the lady, 
garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple 
crepe. . . ." 

The fire, the tiger, the " clinging garment " ; the pic- 
ture is reproduced word for word. These two ladies had 
pictures of passion to paint ; they did not wish to dis- 
turb us with anything original ; they took the acknowl- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 37 

edged stock scenery; and painted the same thing in the 
same way. And what's more, the trick succeeded. I 
suppose it always will succeed ; if you asked any lady 
of the Elder Profession I am sure you would be told that 
the trick, no matter how old, how oft repeated, had its 
definite value in coin of the realm. Some ladies throw in, 
for good measure, a statue of Phryne; they keep it con- 
spicuous in the room, or in their writing; they sometimes 
mispronounce it ; but who, minded passionately, cares for 
pronunciation ? 

Again I would have you join me: " The ladies! God 
bless 'em ! " 

And again let us apologise to Helen, whom we left 
kneeling before the dancing fire: 

" Her hands grasped the two arms of Richard's chair. 
The loveliness of her person was discovered rather than 
concealed by these changeful sea-blue draperies. And 
there, in the arm-chair, sat Richard, with his ravisher mo- 
mentarily closing in upon him. He could feel the honey 
in her hair, see the dangerous potency of her body." 

All would indeed have been sea-blue had not Richard's 
mother come in just then. Helen came out of the scene 
with no little tact, and there was an end of that little 
temptation. 

Later on, Richard, soured by other affairs, vowed he'd 
go to the devil his own way. He bade his home and 
his mother good-bye, and started for the East, and the 
shores of Italy. Just like Byron, you see. Alas, poor 
Byron ! One wonders if he, too, was made love to for 
the sake of the exquisite sensation his deformity might 
lend the perverted women of his time. But let us not 
wander from our second, successful, scene of ravishment. 
It was in Naples, and there was no mother to interfere. 
Richard was, this time, on a couch ; you must note the 
improvement upon the arm-chair. The couch lends it- 
self more fitly to the episode that must now, faintingly, 



38 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

haltingly, be hinted. Helen and Richard had just dined 
together. She had already warned him ; he was in some- 
thing of a state of mind; not to mention his body; all 
his three quarters were fevered by expectation. Then, 
from the direction of Helen's apartments, he heard the 
whisper of silk. He saw before him Helen. In the haste 
of her bare-footed journey " the fronts of the sea-blue, 
sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus 
disclosing, not only her night-dress, but — since this last 
was fine to the point of transparency — all the secret love- 
liness of her body and her limbs." This was what she 
told Richard, lying pale and fevered amid the cushions : 

" Let what will happen to-morrow, this, very certainly, 
shall happen to-night — that with you and me Love shall 
have his own way, speak his own language, be worshiped 
with the rites he found in the sacrament ordained by 
himself, and to which all nature is, and has been, obedient 
since life on earth first began ! " 

Now no courtesan, of ever so fine a fibre, ever made 
man such a speech, or ever would, had he legs or no legs, 
" since life on earth first began." More than that, no 
woman, courtesan or virgin, ever made such a speech, or 
ever will. I shall have plenty to sa} r , presently, on the 
whole detail of what writers have thought fit to palm 
off as the speech of human beings ; but no single speech 
that can be cited in the whole list of absurd conversations 
in literature surpasses the one just quoted for utter un- 
reality, for sheer impossibility. 

As impossible, as completely foreign to life, as was that 
speech, so was the entire book. A thousand miles re- 
moved from truth, from life, that speech was the measure 
of the whole book's specious folly. The hundreds of 
pages showing the trials of Lady Calmady, and the man- 
ner in which her son, Richard, met the misfortunes of his 
deformity, were all sheer padding. What the author was 
really after was to write those questionable scenes of ab- 
normal passion just quoted. She saw the sensation she 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 39 

could make out of these two: a something less than man, 
and a something other than wholesome woman. A refined 
courtesan, who ravished a man with two thoughts in her 
mind; one the exquisitely perverted nature of the passion 
to be consummated between her and this deformity; the 
other the revenge she meant to wreak upon him after- 
wards ; — such was the heroine upon whom the best efforts 
of Lucas Malet were expended in " Sir Richard Cal- 
mady." Those situations were nothing less than abomin- 
able. There was never a book less fit for decent minds. 
The episodes on which the most loving care were bestowed, 
those episodes which I have tried, as faintly as the de- 
cencies of my own page allow, to echo, were utterly and 
entirely unfit for aught save the columns of the medical 
journals. And for those columns they were too fantas- 
tically untrue to life. 

The vital element of life was lacking in the book. All 
its people were shadows moving in an unhealthy glimmer 
of passionate perversion. The memories of Lord Byron, 
the most fantastic stories about him, are a thousand 
times more valuable than this would-be sensational imi- 
tation of the Byronic tragedies. The author's pet figure, 
Helen — she of the sea-blue, sea-green draperies, the 
honey-colored hair, the finesse in abnormal passions — be- 
longs, not to the world where honest men and women 
move, but in that land beyond the pale where the excesses 
and ecstasies of Paris and Rome and Alexandria mingle 
to fill the asylums for the insane. Compared to " Sir 
Richard Calmady " the " Aphrodite " of Pierre Louys was 
a chaste and frigid thing. Elaborate as were the French- 
man's excerpts from the erotic orgies of Alexandria, no 
picture of his so shocked as did this stuff of Lucas Malet's ; 
the one was nature naked and unashamed, the other was 
sophisticated, prurient lechery. 

Yet, to prove for what, in our time, we have the ladies 
to thank, it was necessary to remind you of " Sir Richard 
Calmady." 



40 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Again, a toast, if you please ; you know the formula by 
now. 

In silence, and upstanding ! 

If you will contrast " Sir Richard Calmady " with W. 
H. Mallock's " Romance of the Nineteenth Century," 
you will see how, in comparatively few years, the ladies 
had left the other sex, to use the jargon of the turf, 
standing still. Tastes had veered Parisward noticeably 
in the interim. What was most objectionable in the flood 
of vileness was the prevalent lack of artistic workmanship, 
and the hypocrisy with which most of these writers pre- 
tended they were teaching moral lessons. Sarah Grand 
maundered to us of the physiology of childbirth while 
making believe that she was reading us a lesson in con- 
duct. All this was at a time when both England and 
America veiled their faces at mention of Oscar Wilde's 
name. Wilde never went about telling maudlin tales of 
the morals he wished to point. Mr. Mallock, Edgar Sal- 
tus, and Oscar Wilde, of those who adventured upon cer- 
tain primrose precipices by the highway of fiction, and A. 
W. Pinero, who went the same course through the drama, 
had all saving excellencies of style, manner, and taste. 
Though these writers came surely enough into the class 
of artists whom R. L. Stevenson declared Daughters of 
Joy, yet they deserve no such censure as should fall upon 
those writers, as Frank Danby, and Lucas Malet, whose 
vulgar versions of the illicit, the obscene, and the con- 
cupiscent, tended to so much disgust. 

Another lady who proved to us that dear Thackeray's 
scruples no longer worried her sex was Kate Chopin. The 
book I have in mind was called " The Awakening." Like 
many others that may be named in these pages of mine, 
it is doubtless utterly forgotten ; but it would be illogical 
for me to proclaim that we had a deal to thank the ladies 
for, if I had not the documents at hand to prove it. 

Again this seemed a subject for the physician, not 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 41 

the novelist. So skilfully and so hardily does the book 
reveal the growth of animalism in a woman, that we feel 
as if we were attending a medical lecture. In the old 
days, — when men, mere men such as Balzac or Flaubert 
or Gautier, attempted this sort of dissection, — we were 
wont to sigh, and think what brutes they must be to 
suppose women made of this poor clay. Surely it was 
only the males who harbored thoughts fit only for the 
smoking-room; surely — but, Pouff! Kate Chopin dis- 
pelled those dreams ; even had they really been possible 
with Amelie Rives, and " What Dreams May Come," 
already in circulation. 

" The Awakening " asked us to believe that a young 
woman who had been several years married, and had 
borne children, had never, in all that time, been properly 
" awake." It would be an arresting question for students 
of sleep-walking ; but one must not venture down that by- 
path now. Her name was Edna Pontellier. She was mar- 
ried to a man who had Creole blood in him ; yet the mar- 
rying, and the having children, and all the rest of it, 
had left, her still slumbrous, still as innocent of her 
physical self, as the young girl who graduates in the early 
summer would have us believe she is. She was almost at 
the age that Balzac held so dangerous — almost she was 
the Woman of Thirty — yet she had not properly tasted 
the apple of knowledge. She had to wait until she met 
a young man who was not her husband, was destined to 
tarry until she was under the influence of a Southern 
moonlight and the whispers of the Gulf and many other 
passionate things, before there began in her the first faint 
flushings of desire. So, at any rate, Kate Chopin asked 
us to believe. 

The cynic was forced to observe that simply because a 
young woman showed interest in a man who was not her 
husband, especially at a fashionable watering-place, in a 
month when the blood was hottest, there was no need to 
argue the aforesaid fair female had lain coldly dormant 



42 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

all her life. There are women in the world quite as versa- 
tile as the butterfly, and a sprouting of the physical to- 
day need not mean that yesterday was all spiritual. 

However, taking Kate Chopin's word for it that Edna 
had been asleep, her awakening was a most champagne-like 
performance. After she met Robert Lebrun the awaken- 
ing stirred in her, to use a rough simile, after the manner 
of ferment in new wine. Robert would, I fancy, at any 
Northern summer resort have been sure of a lynching; 
for, after a trifling encounter with him, Edna became ut- 
terly unmanageable. She neglected her house; she tried 
to paint — always a bad sign, that, when women want to 
paint, or act, or sing, or write ! — and the while she painted 
there was " a subtle current of desire passing through 
her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and mak- 
ing her eyes burn." 

Does that not explain to you certain pictures you have 
seen? Now you know how the artist came to paint them 
just like that. 

All this, mind you, with Robert merely a reminiscence. 
If the mere memory of him made her weak, what must 
the touch of him have done? Fancy shrinks at so vol- 
canic a scene. Ah, these sudden awakenings of women, 
of women who prefer the dead husband to the quick, of 
women who accept the croupier's caresses while waiting 
for hubby to come up for the week-end, and of women 
who have been in a trance, though married! Especially 
the awakenings of women like Edna! 

We were asked to believe that Edna was devoid of 
coquetry ; that she did not know the cheap delights of 
promiscuous conquests ; though sometimes on the street 
glances from strange eyes lingered in her memory, dis- 
turbing her. Well, then those are the women to look 
out for — those women so easily disturbed by the un- 
familiar eye. Those women do not seem to care, once 
they are awake, so much for the individual as for what 
he represents. Consider Edna. It was Robert who awoke 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 43 

her. But, when he went away, it was another who con- 
tinued the arousal. Do you think Edna cared whether 
it was Robert or Arobin? Not a bit. Arobin's kiss upon 
her hand acted on her like a narcotic, causing her to sleep 
" a languorous sleep, interwoven with vanishing dreams." 
You see, she was something of a quick-change sleep-artist : 
first she slept; a look at Robert awakened her; Arobin's 
kiss sent her off into dreamland again; a versatile som- 
nambulist, this. Yet she must have been embarrassing; 
you could never have known just when you had her in a 
trance or out of it. 

How wonderful, how magical those Creole kisses of 
Arobin's must have been, if one of them, upon the hand, 
could send Edna to sleep ! What might another sort of 
kiss have done? One shivers thinking of it; one has un- 
canny visions of a beautiful young woman all ablaze 
with passion as with a robe of fire. Arobin, however, had 
no such fears. He continued gaily to awake Edna — or 
to send her to sleep; our author was never clear which 
was which ! — and it was not long before he was allowed to 
talk to her in a way that pleased her, " appealing to the 
animalism that stirred impatiently within her." One won- 
ders what he said ! It was not long before a kiss was per- 
mitted Arobin. " She clasped his head, holding his lips 
to hers. It was the first kiss of her life to which her 
nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that 
kindled desire." 

Ah, these married women, who have never, by some 
strange chance, had the flaming torch applied, how they 
do flash out when the right moment comes ! This heroine, 
after that first flaming torch, went to her finish with light- 
ning speed. She took a walk with Arobin, and paused, 
mentally, to notice " the black line of his leg moving in 
and out so close to her against the yellow shimmer of 
her gown." She let the young man sit down beside her, 
let him caress her, and they did not " say good-night until 
she had become supple to his gentle seductive entreaties." 



44 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

To think of Kate Chopin, who once contented herself 
with mild yarns about genteel Creole life — pages almost 
clean enough to put into the Sunday school library, 
abreast of Geo. W. Cable's stories — blowing us a hot blast 
like that! Well, San Francisco, and Paris, and London, 
and New York had furnished Women Who Did; why not 
New Orleans? 

" The black line of his leg moving in and out. . . ." 
Why, even that Japo-German apostle of plaquet-prose, 
Sadakichi Hartmann, did not surpass this when he wrote 
in his " Lady of the Yellow Jonquils " : " She drew her 
leg, that was nearest to me, with a weavy graceful motion 
to her body. . . ." 

It may seem indelicate, in view of where we left Edna, 
to return to her at once; we must let some little time 
elapse. Imagine, then, that time elapsed, and Robert 
returned. He did not know that Arobin had been taking 
a hand in Edna's awakening. Robert had gone away, 
it seems, because he scrupled to love Edna, she being mar- 
ried. But Edna had no scruples left ; she hastened to in- 
timate to Robert that she loved him, that her husband 
meant nothing to her. Never, by any chance, did she 
mention Arobin. But, dear me, Arobin, to a woman like 
that, had been merely an incident ; he merely happened 
to hold the torch. Now, what in the world do you sup- 
pose that Robert did? Went away — pouff! — like that! 
Went away, saying he loved Edna too well to — well, to 
partake of the fire the other youth had lit. Think of it! 
Edna finally awake — completely, fiercely awake — and the 
man she had waked up for goes away ! 

Of course, she went and drowned herself. She realised 
that you can only put out fire with water, if all other 
chemical engines go away. She realised that the awaken- 
ing was too great; that she was too aflame; that it was 
now merely Man, not Robert or Arobin, that she desired. 
So she took an infinite dip in the passionate Gulf. 

Ah, what a hiss, what a fiery splash, there must have 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 45 

been in those warm waters of the South! But — what a 
pity that poor Pontellier, Edna's husband, never knew 
that his wife was in a trance all their wedded days, and 
that he was away at the moment of her awakening! For, 
other men failing, there are, after all, some things that 
a husband is useful for, in spite of books like " The 
Awakening," and that other story of a disillusioned female 
polygamist, " Hermia Suydam." About the latter story 
I shall say nothing, since I prefer, later in my book, to 
consider its author, Gertrude Atherton, in her period of 
riper judgment and finer art. "Hermia Suydam" was 
an early indiscretion; it had not even as excuse such fin- 
ished iart as Edgar Saltus put into " Tristram Varick " 
and " Mr. Incoul " ; it may have attracted attention, have 
aroused discussion; but as a bit of workmanship Mrs. 
Atherton must often, in later years, have wished that she 
had never written it. The most you can say for it is 
that it was a first — no, second — offense. 

There was no such excuse for Kate Chopin. She was 
already distinguished for charming contes of Creole life. 
" The Awakening " was a deliberate case of pandering 
to what seemed the taste of that moment. 

While it is the ladies for whom we have so far made 
way, you are by no means to suppose that we are not to 
leave them alone if our attention seem to distress them. 
They had much to say in that period of letters I am 
trying to ramble in; but they by no means committed all 
the crimes, or gathered all the laurels. They did not even 
have to themselves the field of eroticism ; there were D'An- 
nunzios and Le Galliennes and Saltuses who kept pace 
with them there. But there was undeniably a time, be- 
ginning with Mona Caird's inquiry: Is Marriage a 
Failure? when the ladies seemed to dominate the scene. 
They achieved, at any rate, this : they showed what women 
could write, and women read, in their efforts to attain 
those ambitions so loudly acclaimed by our newspapers: 
the best selling novels. 



40 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Disabuse your mind of the notion that my book is to 
have anything like orderliness in chronology or in logic. 
You will find plenty of other books, written by serious 
scholiasts, that will serve your purpose better, if you are 
looking for a temperate balancing of all the good and 
evil in our recent American letters. Here is a little ramble 
up this lane and that; a little roving from one subject 
to another ; a taking you by the elbow and strolling with 
you into paths forgotten perhaps but still useful; a lei- 
surely companionable enterprise in which, if the mood so 
orders, you may be asked to listen to personal prejudices 
and even to personal memories. Yet, however haphazard 
may seem the links in the chain, in the end you will, 
I believe, be able to find the chain pulling always one 
way, toward the emancipation of American literature from 
the dominance of the dollar. 

A critic's soul does not always find its adventures among 
masterpieces. They are not always great books that will 
here be used to point certain arguments. Often it is from 
the most insignificant impetus that a valuable achievement 
comes. Time and again has a worthless book been use- 
ful to the critic who was greater than what he criticised. 
This is a matter to be gone into at considerable length 
much later in this book, but it cannot too soon be im- 
pressed upon you as one of the Articles in my critical 
Creed : 

The critic is mostly greater than the stuff he works in. 

If America had any critics that might be taken as a 
national compliment. It has, however, unfortunately only 
newspapers, not critics. 

Books you may never have heard of, and authors you 
may deem insignificant, will appear in these pages. The 
best-sellers will appear rarely, because they have usually 
been, from the standpoints of art or argument, only 
awful examples. While there are some awful examples in 
my book, especially here at its opening, for the most part 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 47 

the books and the authors are chosen for discussion in 
that they made certain impressions on a mind given some- 
what to epicureanism ; they were what most clearly marked 
the milestones on the critic's own progress. They gave 
him sensations and ideas that may, possibly, intrinsically 
interest you. 

Those sensations were often despondent enough. Con- 
templation of the average literary production led easily 
enough to the notion that really fine writing and artistic 
composition were dead among us. Yet always, just as 
one was at 'the last gasp of optimism, something turned 
up to give one breath again. Had one not always counted 
on this inevitable turn of the tide ; had one not kept one's 
judgment — wrongly called pessimism by the undiscerning 
— keen for sentencing only so as not to use up one's 
store of appreciative enthusiasm — one would have tired 
long ago of spying out the land ahead of the reading 
public. A confirmed pessimist has no business in the criti- 
cal office, no more than has the confirmed optimist. The 
former so wastes his censure that when a really supreme 
call comes he has nothing out of the usual 'to offer; the 
latter makes eulogy so cheap that when honest need 
for it arrives his praise sounds no louder than when, as 
is his habit, he merely echoes the advertisements of the 
publishers. 

Even the advertisements of the publishers have long 
since tired of many of the books that are now serving 
my purpose; but that shall not prevent my rummaging 
nosingly in the shot literary rubbish of the yesteryears. 
It was 'the chaff no less than the wheat that kept one's 
enthusiasm alive. Without enthusiasms there would be 
neither novelists nor critics, neither God nor devil. 

Such stories as Beatrice Harraden's " The Fowler," 
and Kassandra Vivaria's " Via Lucis," are forgotten 
long ago. Had not the former been echoed, some years 
later, in E. F. Benson's " Paul," and the latter been such 



48 Their day in court 

an obvious effort to translate D'Annunzio into female 
terms, they would not be worth even 'this slight mention. 

Theodore Bevan, in the Hiarraden novel, seduced the 
minds of all the women he met. 

There, surely, our authoress gave us something new, 
something to thank herself and her sex for. Conceive the 
spectacle of a weeping maiden pleading for justice, for 
the punishment of villainy, because: "Your Worship, 
he seduced my mind ! " Conceive the expert testimony 
that has to be gone into when the crime of mental se- 
duction is once properly on the statutes ! In the pages 
of " The Fowler " this hero seduced — mentally, of course 
— no less than three young women. He took young per- 
sons full of the joy of life, appreciating all things, who 
loved Nature and humanity, and were satisfied even with 
themselves, and he turned their flowers to ashes, their joy 
to misery. The persons to whom " The Fowler " must 
have appealed most directly are the professional mesmer- 
ists, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Also " Dodo " Benson. 

If the hero of " The Fowler " was an uncanny creature, 
and one for whose creation we find it hard to forgive 
Beatrice Harraden, the. heroine of " Via Lucis " reminds 
one not a little of that other Creole lady whose awaken- 
ing Kate Chopin so passionately painted for us. Her 
name was Arduina, and she had " hot white fingers, pas- 
sionate to the nail-tips." She had burning hair. When 
Prospero, who was an officer in the Italian navy, in 
command of a torpedo boat, took hold of her hat, she 
turned pale and cold. This was surely something new. 
Students of the history of love, as Edgar Saltus in Amer- 
ica, and Frank Richardson in England, should take note 
of this item. A girl with burning hair, and hot white fin- 
gers, who turned pale and cold as you picked up her 
hat, was surely worth noting. When Prospero had given 
back her hat, a tide of rich young blood gurgled round 
her troubled eyes, and, receding, left her mouth a violent 
bloody streak and her eyes mere purple blotches. On an- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 49 

other occasion, when Prospero had told her that he loved 
her, and had sucked away the sarcasm of her unkissed 
lips — which seems a somewhat desperate remedy ! — she 
pressed her lips to his forehead till she panted. 

Do you wonder that, after that, Arduina went into a 
convent ? She should have been able to teach even Evelyn 
Innes a thing or two. 

When she came out from the convent Prospero had 
married another. But he had not forgotten her. Hot 
white fingers and panting kisses were not so easily for- 
gotten, especially as he was in charge of a torpedo boat 
and knew the possibilities in explosives. So, when these 
two came together again, we got this noble scene: 

The jerk of him suddenly falling upon her had been more 
than she could bear. She was not armed for defense. But 
she knew, she knew too well, what a few seconds more 
would mean. She tried to free herself. 

And he could not let her go. Had he wanted to, the power 
was gone. With a sort of heaped-up rage he strained her 
to himself, kissing her, caressing her, calling her all the 
tender, foolish names he had had three long years to imagine 
and accumulate — names that he had never called any other 
woman, not even the one or two who had intensely appealed 
to him. 

" Let me go ! " she groaned, the first time his famished 
lips left hers free to speak. "What are we doing? What 
are you making me do ! Your wife is ill ! Think of her ! 
She may be in danger before many hours. And I love her ! " 

" Leave my wife alone. I love you ! " 

" I know, I know ! You have made me miserable — for- 
ever," she panted. " Ah, for God's sake, let me go ! " 

He was beyond hearing, and soon she was beyond resist- 
ance. Her youth's crushed desire had been too keen, and 
the suffering of it had been too long. 

" Ah, dearest, sweetheart ! As you will ! To be happy 
once. Kiss me just once again — again — once again — once 
more." 

Her limbs relaxed their tension and yielded, and dragged 



50 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

him with them in their gradual sinking. Still clasped as in 
a death-grip, they felt the long, harsh grass, just ripe for 
hay, meet over their faces. 

A vision of two large bright butterflies chasing each 
other in a love-race across the sky so royally blue, so in- 
finitely free, far above in the white clumps of flowering 
acacias and the feathery masses of pink peach-blossoms with 
the wealth of their autumn promise — this was the last image 
her closed eyes carried with them far into the trance. 

Like the breath of a primeval gladness made new again, 
a warm thrill ran over the breezy field and its blood-red 
crowd of poppies. 

When the warm thrill had run its course over the 
breezy field Arduina was brought back to Rome by a 
maid. The fact that after the trance and the thrill, 
that might have enervated the ordinary person, this 
young woman was able to pick up her portmanteau and 
sling it into a cab, should prove to you the kind of a 
hairpin she was. 

Yet she was utterly, irremediably tiresome. Her as- 
ceticism is as disgusting as her hysteria. When she mar- 
ried Prospero she wearied him with too much loving, just 
as she wearied whoso read of her. 

It was simply another case of a young woman deter- 
mined to undrape her mind. Veiling her book's first part 
with dissertations on convent life, she found herself at 
home only in the heat of passion and the lees of senti- 
mentality. She gave a picture of Prospero, sickening of 
Arduind's love, that was surely nothing less than repul- 
sive : " Prospero 's age, character and formerly dissi- 
pated — or, at least, independent — habits could not give 
her back the violent, exacting love of her panting long- 
restrained twenty-four summers." No, probably not. He 
was only a torpedo-boat captain, not a pastmaster in 
Alexandrian revels. 

The case of this book's author, Kassandra Vivaria, has 
its value in marking the progress of the writing women. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 51 

She was an Italian ; she tried to beat Swinburne and D'An- 
nunzio at their own game; she only succeeded in proving 
that when a woman writes badly she writes a hundred 
times worse than man at his worst. Her torrid subject, 
her eccentric English, did not prevent the publishers from 
supposing that this was the sort of thing the American 
women — who seem the only Americans who spend money 
on books — might like to read. So eccentric was her Eng- 
lish that she painted " a lean, neurasthenic man with an 
hallucinated face," and on another page a man walking 
with a woman " adapts his face to hers." 

Do you know what a hallucinated face is, or a face that 
you can adapt to another's ? Do you think either of them 
is really wholesome? 

Carelessly as the examples were chosen, they must 
surely prove that these writing women were able to go to 
every length to attain their objects of startling the com- 
munity; they could disclose the inmost secrets of their 
sex; they were willing to sacrifice everything and any- 
thing; they had all the essentials for success, brazen ef- 
frontery, shamelessness, fluency — all save the greatest of 
all, great art. 

If you were able to see the ridiculous in all those 
passionate scenes of which you have just been reminded, 
if all that energy and ill intention went, with the reader, 
for worse than nothing, it was because those writers were 
essentially third-rate artists. The artistic values of reti- 
cence, of simplicity, were not in their schemes ; they saw 
the world hectic, awry, distorted, and so their art was a 
hideous, bungled, absurd thing. It was to be many years 
before a woman really showed that in English the passion 
of the sexes could be voiced artistically ; not until Victoria 
Cross wrote " Life's Shop Window " had any woman 
written anything, on this subject, that was other than art 
of the poorest and most shoddy. Despite their shame- 
lessness in details, that man's finer sense of shame pre- 



52 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

vented him from attempting, they never made strong im- 
pressions ; they lacked the saving salts of style, of taste, 
and of art. If, for a time, they seemed to dominate the 
scene, it was because they shrieked the most loudly, and 
the publishers shrieked for them ; it took the public some 
little time to emerge from that shrieking chorus and find, 
calmly, that nothing at all had happened save what was 
not worth remembering. 

For bad art is never worth remembering, save as 
a warning. 



CHAPTER THREE 

Curiously enough the most daring advance in realism 
of the sort we have been considering in these pages was 
also the most artistic. 

Whatever may have been attempted in those hidden 
ways of print that properly have no rank in literature, 
there was still one from which even the most relentless 
realist, even the most shameless of the shrieking sister- 
hood had turned. In English, at any rate. Whatever 
the reason, whether fear of public or publisher, philistine 
or purist, that subject had been avoided by the most 
daring. If you bring up the case of those copies of the 
Pall Mall Gazette that went to a premium a few hours 
after publication, one has to retort simply that those 
pages did not happen to be literature. Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti made some delicate hints in this direction, and 
there was once a time when it looked as if George Moore 
might turn his coldly artistic eye upon matters horizon- 
tal rather than Celtic. Yet to all intents and purposes 
no modern writer in English dared attempt actual literary 
chronicle of a fallen woman's life. 

In whatever language, the task must be formidable. To 
lead the reader into completion of the book by the fas- 
cination of the earlier chapters, wherein must be described 
the most despicable of man's inhumanities to woman, is 
surely no light task. Though we may admit women of 
the night into our metropolitan life, we bar them from 
our literature. Except as an adjunct to consumption or 
a high soprano, we do not reserve any place in art for 
the daughter of pleasure. In the main, no doubt, this is 
just as well. The lesser writers would hopelessly brutalise 
the subject; the greater ones avoid it either from distaste, 
or from fear of falling beneath the demands of the case, 
53 



54 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Besides, in letters as in life, there was always the unfair 
competition of those members of society who, ostensibly 
ou'tside the Yoshiwara, yet ply its artifices. As, for in- 
stance, those various lady novelists to whom your atten- 
tion has already been called. 

If the thing was to be done at all, in any manner pos- 
sibly to be classed as artistic, you would have thought the 
language would be French. In that tongue one would 
expect the exact finesse, the delicate slighting of the 
cruelly bestial, the lifting of all beautiful details, that 
would go to a sum total of really artistic embroidery upon 
a subject full of ugliness but also full of human suffering. 
When the thing was finally done, however, it was not in 
French. 

France had given us " Aphrodite." That, in its frank 
fleshliness, was something the shrieking sisterhood riad 
never, with all their sickly sentimental poses, managed 
to equal as to its art. There you had the enthusiastic 
devotee of love ; but you had her without any false trap- 
pings that included such words as Sin and Society ; you 
had her shown you at a time when Love was indeed, and 
not merely in a sentimental sermonising, the Greatest 
Thing in the World. It was a cult. That cult of love 
was lifted to the dominant places among all cults ; ques- 
tions of morals had no more business in that cult than 
esthetics to-day have in politics — and the picture Louys 
gave us was so staged that no touch of the sordid, the 
brutal or the mercenary even for one instant appeared 
there. It was French art at its best, proving most di- 
rectly its descent from the art of the Greeks. 

But when this strange thing came to be done it was by 
a German, and a woman. That her product can be con- 
sidered as art at all is the miracle. The crass forth- 
rightness of the German mind so often had produced only 
the dirty. Some of their caricaturists still prove that: 
their work is comparable only to the grotesque bestialities 
of such obsolete brute-Britons as Rowlandson. If one had 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 55 

not been prepared for it by the gradual changes that 
had been coming over all Teutonic art and letters in this 
same century-turning period, one would have been pro- 
foundly surprised by this book, " The Diary of a Lost 
Soul." Concerning that change, in which the arts typi- 
fied by the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw 
in England, by the cabaret, by Verlaine, and all 'the so- 
called decadents in France, combined to produce the Ueber- 
brettle liaison between Poetry and the Music Hall — you 
are to learn later on in my book. That such change had 
been proceeding was apparent to all but the most single- 
tongued literary observers ; in view of such change there 
was nothing so astounding in this book appearing in Ger- 
many. Indeed, after you saw how German art had 
changed in those twenty years to the point where " Das 
Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen " was possible, you could ac- 
cept it and weigh it deliberately as a work of art. You 
saw then that it typified German art just as " Aphrodite " 
typified French art. You saw, too, that it was work that 
you could take sheerly on its own merits, without regard 
to anything else than its own effect. 

" Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen " then was a pro- 
foundly moving book, epochal, tremendous. Tremendous 
in its truth, and in the effect it seemed sure to produce. 
We first read the book in 1905 ; in the years that have 
elapsed since then it has reached a sale in six figures ; in 
Germany they do not blazon those facts so noisily as 
here in America, but when those figures are reached some- 
thing actual has been achieved ; it is not mere press- 
agent's noise. 

Sensational as the book was, it was the sensationalism 
that is in great tragedy. Into this terrible tragedy — the 
tragedy of innumerable lives offered up yearly in our 
modern civilisation, the same civilisation that sends mis- 
sionaries to China — we are plunged at the very outset 
of the story. The simplest of all methods, the diary, was 
used. The simplest, and in this case, the most effective. 



50 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

The diarist recounts her schoolgirl years. The daughter 
of an apothecary in a small town, she had inheri'ted, 
through her father, a bit of bad blood. Once, long ago, 
there had been a light-lived Frenchwoman who married 
into the family. 

(Here, let us pause just & moment to note that while 
the other nations now rival the French in flinging off all 
the fetters that once tried to link ethics with art, in 
most of those newly emancipated tongues, — in the English 
and in the German, at any rate — some of the burden of 
original guilt is still flung back upon fair France. Frank 
Danby pandered to her British readers by invariably de- 
scribing her erring heroines as of French extraction ; and 
even the somewhat heavy eccentricities, which that emi- 
nent tractarian, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, was for so long 
in the habit of introducing into her otherwise socially per- 
fect heroes and heroines, were invariably accounted for 
by French blood or the example of Julie de l'Espinasse.) 

Our diarist assures us that the curse of that light-lived 
Frenchwoman had descended upon poor Thymian. The 
mother a Gallic cocotte, the father was really little better. 
To put it mildly, he was a devil among the women. His 
daughter, while still innocent of evil, witnessed a curiously 
rapid succession of housekeepers, after her mother's death. 
Then, after many schoolgirl scrapes, left utterly to chance 
and her own physical promptings, comes a fall from social 
grace, expulsion into outer darkness, and inevitable conse- 
quences. Here followed chapters that made of the book 
the artistic accomplishment that it assuredly was. As 
surely as " Life's Show Window " in English, or " Aphro- 
dite " in French, so is " Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen " 
memorable in the tale of the sex stories that in our time 
have been imbued with art as well as sex. Had not the 
chapters depicting Thymian's mother-love, the agony of 
her renunciation, of her giving up her nameless child to 
the care of others, been so fine in handling, so compelling 
in emotional power, so exquisitely human, the reader could 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 57 

hardly have kept courage for penetrating into the ghastly, 
horrid, abominably actual chapters that followed. But 
the power with which that quite average, sordid fall was 
painted, and the tenderness with which we were made to 
realise the mother-heart, compelled us to the abyss that 
opened beyond. 

Step by step we were shown the way into abysmal per- 
dition. Gradually the girl gives way to the fate society 
had pointed for her. At first, in the upper scale, by the 
equivocal methods of demi-virgins ; eventually in the utter 
callousness of the public vendors of flesh. The mysterious 
days and nights in that life compound of champagne and 
jewels and money are described with appalling suggestion; 
we see the diarist, in that period, still hesitating on the 
brink between love and lovelessness ; she had not yet 
reached the point where merely money mattered. The 
stamp of pseudo-respectability was not yet effaced. Here 
revealed to us was the life of the protectors, the angels, 
the gentlemen friends, the papas, and all the other politely 
mendacious nomenclature that similar circles employ wher- 
ever in any part of the world you find both Ways that 
are Dark and Ways that are too conspicuously White. 
Jewels, and dress, and money — easily got, easily gone. 
Fading, gradually but surely, the care for anything but 
murdering the moment. To make both ends meet, to 
keep afloat — that was what this human bark was trying 
for; nothing else. 

Throughout, at every crisis, keen intelligence, self- 
analysis, and appreciation of fate's vagaries, kept awake 
in Thymian; through the most diverse fortunes her diary 
kept its spirit. On this point, indeed, the author laid 
great stress. Though this poor girl's body sank con- 
stantly lower, her mind was all the time forging higher 
and higher. She read voraciously; she consumed philos- 
ophy, sociology, and all more serious literature. Per- 
haps, but for the insistence on these qualities in Thymian, 
the recital of her bodily descents into hell might have be- 



58 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

come too terrible. As it was, we followed her depths as 
earnestly as we tried to recall her heights. You may 
aver that so intelligent a girl never could have had such 
a life ; that all this is a bit of trickery, of mere literature ; 
but to make that assertion you would need much hardy 
ignorance of life. Yet had there been exaggeration, it 
would have been excusable, so that Thymian might still 
win her place in literature, and, by winning that place, be 
of some actual service, perhaps, to that despised fraction 
of humanity which all the other fractions profess to scorn. 

The most abject role in the book was played, not by the 
unfortunate heroine, but by her family. It was that 
family which constantly drove her from one comparatively 
safe harbor to another. Time and again when she had 
found shelter of at least a semi-respectability, the family 
bobbed up, under pretense of caring for her good name, 
and chivied her out into — utter damnation. Upon the 
last fatal crisis that drove her definitely upon the way of 
bodily commerce we are not informed. Here there was a 
hiatus in the diary. Otherwise the reader wishing the 
sensational need not complain of any omissions whatever. 

It was all there, that life of those wretched ones. The 
life that reeks of the streets, of the creatures of the streets, 
of foul language, foul thought, foul living. What need 
to tell of it more elaborately? Whoso does not live in 
a cage or a cave knows our modern Babylons well enough 
to know that if the life of any one of its victims were 
put down carefully, word for word, day by day, the re- 
cital must be terribly tragic, terribly shocking; and that 
is what this recital of days and nights in Hamburg and 
Berlin is. Lovers who come and go ; whispering creatures 
of no sex at all who blotted the streets and the cafes ; 
landladies to whom harpies would seem angels of mercy — 
all these mingled and crossed in the pages of that book. 

Unless I translated for you page upon page, chapter 
after chapter, I could not hope to impress on you the 
horror of that bald chronicle of a life misnamed as " of 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 59 

pleasure." Every sort of vice that the police and the 
alienists wot of had its hint there; amid those ghastly 
uglinesses, and amid her own life of loveless commerce, we 
saw the girl Thymian still preserving the vigor of her 
mind, of her clear outlook on life, of her criticisms upon 
society at large. We saw too the uplifts she occasionally 
made ; the good luck that sometimes came to her from the 
bad ; and the something very like peace and security that 
came to her before the very last. 

In the final count, aside from its value as a work of 
art, it is as an arraignment of modern society that the 
book must stand. Had it not been for that side of it, 
for the constant comments in that sort, and for the ap- 
pealing force of humanity that informed it all, the book 
might not have been possible of consideration as literature. 
It remains big, epochal. It was a bit of real life trans- 
ferred to writing. Whatever is human — as I remarked 
in the opening of this book you are now reading — has 
claim on humanity's consideration ; if it be presented by 
an artist it has rank as literature. In her " Tagebuch 
Einer Verlorenen " Margarethe Boehme proved herself 
an artist. 

As in the play by Bernard Shaw which a New York 
police commissioner once found unfit for public perform- 
ance, in this book it is the men behind who were ac- 
cused; that was why the book went so deep. That, also, 
was why one did not, reading it, feel the same nausea 
that the Danbys and the Lucas Malets had aroused. The 
smug citizens who raked in the rents from Mrs. Warren's 
little profession, and from the houses of the Widowers, 
are the same ones who were pilloried in " The Diary of a 
Lost Soul." It may not have been sweet reading for the 
smug. But for people of clean lives and clean thought 
it was in many ways a memorable book. It signaled, for 
those who had not themselves visited Germany during 
the early years of our young century, the license in life 
and letters that had come upon a country once thought 



60 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

immersed in science, philosophy, music and material wel- 
fare. The material welfare had produced in Berlin a 
night-life that no other Occidental capital can rival for 
brilliance or shamelessness. In literature the dominance 
of the " Backfisch " was overthrown ; the cry of these 
people was for whatever was the most modern article of 
the moment. Whence came that article, from France, from 
Scandinavia, from Ireland or England, mattered not at 
all. So that it marked an advance, a crossing of moral 
Rubicons once thought impassable ; — nothing else mat- 
tered. 

Just as Flaubert let the career of Emma Bovary exert 
its effect without adding anything of either glamor or 
morals, so is " Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen " consid- 
ered as an actual human and literary document, while 
such pretentious efforts as those I cited before it suc- 
ceeded only in making for disgust and oblivion. 

We had, then, the curious spectacle of the book that 
marked, as to its subject, the lowest point possible even 
to the more shameless sex, being also the highest point 
artistically. The logical sequence had been complete ; 
from describing in terms of fashionable life a number of 
erotically more or less perverted men and women, our 
friends the ladies had finally reached description of a har- 
lot's career. That this career should prove artistically 
and ethically more valuable than the careers of her vari- 
ous unprofessional rivals is one of those ironies that I 
hope the ladies themselves will take warning from. After 
that, nothing further was possible. The ladies have now 
nothing more to reveal. Let there be as many more con- 
fessions in the manner of Marie Bashkirtseff as you like ; 
there are no more depths to plumb ; the tale of shameless- 
ness has been told to the last word. 

As it was in a language other than English that one 
found the logical conclusion to which the work of our 
erotically minded women had been pointing, so it was 
also in a foreign book that the public courtesan was 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 61 

most poetically painted. This was Louys' " Aphrodite," 
to which reference has already been made. The book can 
be included in this present consideration, for the reason 
that though it is by a man, he is to be ranked as that 
next thing to a woman, a feminist. Under the feminists 
one had come to include such writers as Marcel Prevost, 
who occupied himself exclusively with feminine details, 
with imitation of women's love-letters, and with analysis 
of the souls and bodies of a modern type that is half 
virgin, half courtesan. It is not my intention to con- 
sider the feminist writers at any length; but some of 
the work of D'Annunzio in Italy, of Louys in France, of 
Le Gallienne in England, and of Edgar Saltus in Amer- 
ica, has bearing here. " Aphrodite," at any rate, is use- 
ful in contrast to the efforts so many writing women had 
been making to paint the married and unmarried courte- 
sans in our hypocritical modern society. Written by a 
skilled and conscientious artist, it made no efforts toward 
the salacious ; it merely described an ancient apotheosis 
of love, and left that description without comments or 
arguments. What it should have proved to the writing 
sisterhood is that they can never hope, in English, to 
reach that perfection of prose with which Louys painted 
those unshamed and triumphant courtesans who queened 
it in a metropolitan life that once was as real as ours. 

So, in taking my leave, for the time, of the ladies. I 
would wish them knowledge of French and German. The 
literature of the one has already given us the harlot of 
the streets ; the literature of the other has painted, for all 
time, the harlot of the palace. In English there seems 
nothing more to be done. 

If the ladies think otherwise ; if they think they can still 
surpass what they have already done in the way of sex- 
stories, their books will have to be printed on asbestos, 
and critics will have to wear goggles as blue and huge 
as those of motor-men. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

The feminist work first to be considered, after leaving 
the ladies, is Louys' " Aphrodite.' It marked a height 
in sensuality the ladies themselves had never been able 
to reach. It showed that not even the female's greater 
shamelessness could equal the impress made by the male's 
greater art. 

Since the days and nights of the Paphian Venus the 
language of ancient Greece has had but one formidable 
rival in celebration of the charms of the physical. Only 
out of France have come such utterly carnal versions of 
life as the frankly pagan periods produced. Nothing in 
English literature has ever approached the splendid sen- 
sualities of Gautier or of Louys. Against these the prose 
of Walter Pater was as marble to flesh. Beyond mere 
style and language, moreover, the French mode of thought 
has been the only one frank enough to apply itself un- 
reservedly to considerations of the utterly undraped. 

It has already been pointed out how, in English, the 
old Gallic enamorment of nakedness, was more and more 
being voiced, especially by the ladies ; and how, artistic- 
ally, only failure resulted. It was, indubitably, from 
French sources, that the impetus toward sensuousness in 
English letters came. The art employed by our writers, 
however, was never great enough to impose the French 
point of view definitely upon even the most debauched 
section of our reading public. To what heights of sen- 
suousness that French point of view can rise, it will be 
interesting to consider; so it is that we come to " Aphro- 
dite," that masterpiece of the most pagan prose the 
French language can show. 

In " Aphrodite " Pierre Louys turned courtesanship 
62 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 63 

into a poem of a thousand facets, all jeweled and re- 
splendent. He wrote a story that for exquisiteness of 
detail in describing the intricacies of physical love sur- 
passed all previous chronicles of the sort. " Mademoiselle 
de Maupin " seemed, in comparison, a nursery tale. Louys 
sang the most plangent paean of the human body in its 
nakedness ; he swung the incense of almost immaculate 
prose about the perfect beauty that pagandom found in 
love of the flesh. He gave us a chronicle of Greek man- 
ners which made of mythology a garden of unspeakable 
flowers and a hotbed of such vices as Anglo-Saxon lands 
preferred to ignore. He sang the song of utter soulless- 
ness, of perfect pre-occupation with the physical. He 
sang openly, frankly, gladly; not like the English so- 
pranos who had tried that song, furtively, and pretend- 
ing it a moral hymn. 

Even in the subtleties of French those frank revelations, 
upon page after page of " Aphrodite," startled and al- 
most stunned the non-Gallic or non-Greek mind. So ut- 
terly at variance was this picture of Greek morals with 
the mode of thought prevalent in our puritan cosmos that, 
at first contemplation of it, one gasped. However 
strangely fascinating was this gorgeous woof of sensuous 
colors, its entire shamelessness seemed to any Anglo-Saxon 
a trifle revolting. At first, at any rate. Under the 
strange spell of M. Louys, however, it eventually be- 
came possible and even pleasant to forget modern con- 
ventions and modes of thought, and to see life and love 
only from the Greek point of view which he so charmingly 
expounded. Whether such prose in English is possible; 
whether it would be admirable from moral as well as ar- 
tistic standpoints ; that is another matter, and one with 
which we need not now deal. In frankly admitting the 
flesh as well as spirit into the humanities possible for 
English prose, Mr. Maurice Hewlett has done much ; his 
prose itself, with its happy welding of Tuscan charm and 
Saxon forthrightness, is admirable and must be remem- 



64 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

bered in any count of what in our time has been scored 
by those artists who have thought of Style as well as of 
success ; but he has never ventured openly into those an- 
cient Courts of Love in which M. Louys moved so freely. 
Perhaps even Hewlett's fascinating prose might have 
failed if employed continuously on a theme like this. 

When first I read " Aphrodite " it certainly seemed to 
me that these pages could not be shown safely in Eng- 
lish, that our language would brutalise the charm from 
these pictures of splendid vices, and would leave their 
actuality revolting. Nothing that Mr. Edgar Saltus 
has since written in his books dealing directly or indirectly 
with the History of Love has convinced me that I was 
mistaken. The more I read Mr. Saltus the more I wanted 
to re-read Louys, — or the documents in the Astor library. 
If an English version of " Aphrodite " exists, I have been 
spared perusal of it. How, in English, could one pal- 
atably phrase, for instance, such passages as those in 
which were described the gardens of the goddess Aphro- 
dite-Astarte, where hundreds of girls worshiped naught 
but love and were taught nothing else? Or the feast in 
the house of Bacchis, or even the sunset picture of the 
quay of Alexandria, with its moving crowds of idlers vivi- 
fying the pagan life that Louys has painted for us thus : 

De groupes se formaient de place en place, entre lesquels 
erraient les femmes. . . . Les jeunes gens regardaient 
les philosophes, qui contemplaient les courtisanes. Celles-ci 
etaient de tout ordre et de tout condition, depuis les plus 
celebres, vetues de soies legeres at chaussees de cuir d'or, jus- 
qu' aux plus miserables, qui marchaient les pieds nus. Les 
pauvres n'etaient pas moins belles que les autres, mais moins 
heureuses seulement et l'attention des sages se fixaient de 
preference sur elles dont la grace ne'etait pas alteree par 
l'artifice des ceintures et l'encombrement des bijoux. Cornme 
on etait a la veille des Aphrodisies, ces femmes avaient toute 
license de choisir de vetement qui leur seyait le mieux, et 
quelques unes des plus jeunes s'etaient meme risquees a n'en 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 65 

point porter du tout. Mais leur nudite ne choquait personne, 
car elles ne'eussent pas ainsi expose tous les details au soliel, 
si l'un deux se fut signale par la moindre defaut qui pre- 
tait aux railleries des femmes mariees. 



Sheerly and ornately, with the ornateness of elaborate 
detail, of brilliant color and sculpturous artifice, " Aphro- 
dite " was a study of courtesanship in ancient Alexandria. 
It had no more plot than a short story might have, but 
its vocables were more passionate than those of Swin- 
burne, and its shamelessness was such as to make us 
ashamed of shame itself. 

The central figure was Chrysis, a beautiful courtesan 
who left the shores of Galilee at the age of twelve to find 
love and adventure. Two thousand had been the score 
of her lovers, yet had she never loved until she met De- 
metrios, whom all women desired, and who was tired of 
them all, including the queen herself. Demetrios, fasci- 
nated by the indifference shown by Chrysis, promises, — 
in order to possess her who in seven years had refused 
herself to none — to commit three crimes. He steals the 
mirror of Bacchis; to obtain a certain ornament he kills 
the headpriest's wife ; and that Chrysis may have a string 
of pearls he desecrates a sacred statue. But when he has 
done these things — for which others lose their lives and 
at which the populace thunders — his desire for Chrysis 
passes, in possession of her, as in a dream. When she 
comes to him in the flesh, it is he that is all marble, 
she all fire. To gain his caresses she, in turn, vows to do 
his behest. He orders her to take the three articles he 
stole for her and show herself publicly in such wise that 
she is sure to be seized and sent to death. The night be- 
fore her death he vows he will come to her, will give him- 
self to her. He comes, but he gives her only cold philos- 
ophy while she drinks her poison. 

That was the main story, but it abounded in such 
luxurious passages of description, such riotous tints from 



66 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

passion's vase, that the plot was a mere incident in a 
beautiful, enchanting, dangerous exposition of the sacred- 
ness of physical love, of the beauty of the human body. 

My contention, that M. Louys' book reached a point to 
which not even the hardiest of the females or the feminists 
using English would attain, seems borne out by the fact 
that the opera of the same name, though successfully 
given at the Opera Comique in Paris some seven or eight 
years after the appearance of the book, has never yet 
been done in English, though its forerunner, Charpentier's 
" Louise," after eight years of timidity on the part of 
American managers, was finally given our public. 

With music by Camille Erlanger, the dangerously en- 
chanting pictures of Alexandrian life that Louys had in- 
vented for us, reached their most memorable potency. 
Even if one had not read the book, those scenes upon the 
stage of the Opera Comique, those poses of Mary Garden 
singing and playing as Chrysis, were as memorable as 
anything the arts have shown us in the last quarter of a 
century. It was not only while Mary Garden sang and 
the stage courtesans danced those wonderful dances that 
made nearly all other dancing pale and poor, that one 
felt the pertinence of this section of Greek life finding its 
revival in the Paris of to-day ; one could find that per- 
tinence also as one strolled, between the acts, in that glit- 
tering foyer. There, after all those thousand years, the 
mates of Chrysis lived and walked again ; for nakedness 
they had exchanged coverings, that was all; and for the 
frank word courtesan the world had chosen the half- 
hearted one of demi-mondaine ; the person and the pur- 
pose were in no iota changed, though for Alexandria we 
read Paris. 

Ironically considered, perhaps the persons who dole out 
art for American consumption are not to be blamed if 
they wait a decade or so before they transfer to our side 
of the Atlantic such essence of Paris as " Louise," or if 
they prefer not to attempt " Aphrodite " at all. To the 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 67 

danger of being beforehanded, they prefer the odium of 
seeming slow. For there is no greater tragedy than that 
of being, in life or in the arts, before one's time. Many 
a time has that tragedy been mine, and one of those 
cases I must now try to recall for you, even if in doing 
so I seem to depart a little from literature, and what has 
been done by our females and our feminists. That there 
would be plenty such ramblings afield I warned you earlier 
in my book; there were to be many moments when litera- 
ture was to be of interest only as it reminded us of 
something else, and when the books of others were but to 
serve to start reminiscences and sensations of my own. 
This is one of those moments. For its coming the dancing 
in " Aphrodite " must bear the blame. Those dances, 
and the dances that even now are still with us ; these are 
what bring up this little lament over the tragedy of tell- 
ing the world things that it is determined not 'to hear until 
a year or so later. 

It was in the spring of 1906 that I first heard " Aphro- 
dite " sung, eight years after I had first printed an ap- 
preciation of the book in America. Of that same spring 
of 1906, in Europe, it was the prevalent public worship 
of Terpsichore that most impressed itself on my memory. 
It was the dances and the dancers of that season that I 
tried to proclaim on the American side of the Atlantic; 
it was not until two years later that the vogue itself 
reached here; by that time the tragedy of having been 
too soon was mine once again. 

Of other seasons in Europe that had left faint melodies 
and dim memories I recall still one wherein mingled only 
the strains of the " Valse Bleu " and " Amoureuse " ; an- 
other that held the midnight laughter of the cabarets in 
Berlin and Vienna ; and another that echoed interminably 
the music of Franz Lehar. Of that season of 1906 only 
the dancing was memorable. 

It was the year when the garish sparkle of the Maxixe 



68 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

spread about the European continent. Under its own 
name, or many others, such as the Craquette, it was this 
dance that swung itself upon the eye and the ear. From 
Spain to Paris, from Paris to London and Berlin, it had 
rung its countless changes of beauty and danger. The 
melody that it went to dominated Europe; before this 
dance, the cake-walk became an obsolescent exercise. Re- 
calling the portrait of Carmencita by which Sargent first 
clinched his hold upon fame, it seemed not too much to 
suppose that a great artist might have again found a 
great subject in the Maxixe. Zuloaga's was the land that 
sent us the Maxixe; his the brush that might have given 
us the fire and venom of that rhythm. Though to-day 
they dance it no longer at Maxim's, though the mas- 
queraders at Prince's in Piccadilly have already found 
newer diversions, yet of its finest exemplars the most me- 
lodious memories can never quite die for me. To me that 
European season brought nothing more characteristic 
than the dancing of Liane d'Eve in the Maxixe, and of the 
dances in " Aphrodite." Between those two was that sea- 
son in essence. 

In the Maxixe could be found the arts of Carmencita, 
of Otero, and of the old Egyptians. The costume might 
be of the ultra-modernity of Paris patterned on a mold 
of Spain ; but the motion was that of the primeval fe- 
male using beauty for beauty's first purpose. Seduction 
rarely went more lithely to music. The danger in this 
dance was that, danced by couples, one male and one fe- 
male, it was easily vulgarised, easily robbed of all its fine 
innuendo, its voluptuousness left bare and vulgar. When, 
a year or so later, the dance was brought to Broadway, 
we were to see, clearly enough, how completely it could 
be stripped of all save its vulgarity. An artist, as was 
Liane d'Eve, made it the visible medium for passionate 
entreaty. For all the melody and color that are in the 
desire that is also ecstasy. In that swaying of body be- 
fore body, that exchange of retreat for pursuit, all the 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 69 

routine of physical passion was made at once beautiful 
and graphic. 

A friend of mine, a German poet, once dated his In- 
troduction to a volume of Chansons thus : " Munich, In 
the Month of Saharet." That was a good many years 
ago; often enough, since then, could the Londoner have 
dated his letters in " The Maud Allan month," or the 
New Yorker " When Genee Danced." By 1906 Saharet 
was already an old story, but whoso had not seen the 
fine portrait of her by Franz von Lenbach, or the many 
lesser ones by lesser men ; or who had not seen the litera- 
ture and the art of that time, can hardly fancy the hold 
this Australian dancer had upon artistic Germany. She 
became, eventually, a Berliner ; a staid mother of children, 
she still danced, still looked eternally young, and still 
artists scrambled to depict her. In Berlin, that season, 
not even the Maxixe dimmed her lustre. Nor did it dim 
the lustre of Isadore Duncan. Forsaking the Gruene- 
wald, where abominable whispers accused her of being not 
an American — she had used her Americanism as an attrac- 
tion in Europe — but a native Berliner, she descended 
again, that year, after long absence, on Munich, where 
again they repeated their old chorus of appreciation. A 
couple of years afterwards, her German vogue a little 
staled, she was to turn to English and American audi- 
ences, whom Maud Allan and Adeline Genee had schooled 
in the art of the dance. 

It was the oldest, however, that was, in 1906, the new- 
est dancing. Compound of the dances of Spain, of the 
cachuca, of zarzuelas, of the stomach-dance, of the dances 
of the houris in the Asian Orient, the Maxixe expressed 
to moderns the oldest passion in the world. The dances 
in " Aphrodite " expressed exactly the same thing in the 
Greek and Alexandrian syllables. In the staged and 
melody-filled version of the Louys book we saw the apoth- 
eosis of the courtesan, and that apotheosis most essen- 
tially expressed in the dances. Though Erlanger's music 



70 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was of a monotonous sweetness that served only as or- 
chestral background, never as chief charm, the perform- 
ances of " Aphrodite " were the only things in Paris that 
were artistically worth while that year. The girl from 
Chicago, Mary Garden, was admittedly no longer at the 
height of her singing prime. That protegee of Sibyl 
Sanderson, once the pet of all musical Paris ; that spend- 
thrift American beauty whom we were not to hear in 
New York until several seasons later (and were even then 
to find worth raving over as singer and actress) was al- 
ready beginning to pay for having played fast and loose 
with her voice. Yet to have seen and heard her then was 
to have stuff for memory. 

Against that background of fine orchestration, never 
lapsing into melodic assertiveness, against that scenic at- 
mosphere of a painting such as Alma Tadema might have 
painted had he known passion as well as color, those bac- 
chic dances in " Aphrodite " shone incisively. All the 
hard glitter of the aphrodisiac atmosphere accentuated 
the beauty of the robes, the simplicities of the head-dress. 
The Greek robes that clung to every curve of body ; the 
plain bands and fillets that held the hair; all these only 
seemed to add to the passionate swayings of these dancing 
courtesans. 

Those voluptuousnesses of the flute-players that it was 
not possible dramatically to reproduce from the book it- 
self were atoned for by the brave beauty in the dances 
shown us. The oldest profession in the world seemed 
lifted, for those moments, into something so fine, that it 
passed utterly beyond the scope of moral reasoning. The 
courtesans and their life seemed fair at least in aesthetic 
completeness. 

Just as the dances were that season the most memorable 
items in European art, so one could find them, if one 
chose, typical of a dominant note, the note of the Tri- 
umphant Female, that I have already referred to, and 
that has been the theme of all these chapters. There 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 71 

was to be much dancing of other origin ; including espe- 
cially the dances based on Oscar Wilde's " Salome " ; 
but it was the dancing of 1906 I first made a point of 
publicly proclaiming as the distinctive European feature. 
Neither our newspapers, our managers nor our public 
discovered all this until a couple of years afterwards ; 
that was just long enough for my hints to have been 
forgotten. 

Note, then, the moral : wait until the procession moves ; 
never show the way. Unless, that is, you prefer always 
the forefront of the battle, like to feel its fiercest buffets, 
and do not mind being left forgotten on the field after- 
wards. There will be little profit for you; you will in- 
crease the score of your enemies ; and yet, and yet — well, 
being in the ruck of the mob in affairs artistic was never 
to my taste. 

Turning from the work of Pierre Louys to that of the 
other feminists who by their novels deserved inclusion in 
that somewhat erotic assemblage I am here considering, 
we find D'Annunzio, who for brutality surpassed even the 
sex that is his chief subject; Le Gallienne, who was 
erotic in such mild ladylike posturings as to induce both 
disgust and laughter ; and Edgar Saltus, the only Ameri- 
can among these feminists who has deserved well of us by 
having had care for literary style. 

For the sake of the vastness of the contrast, let me 
come, from Pierre Louys, to Richard Le Gallienne. It is 
like listening to a female impersonator in the music-hall 
after you have just heard a robust tenor at the opera. 

At a period when our literature seemed to be written, 
not as Thackeray's idea was, by gentlemen for gentlemen, 
but by women for women, we have seen how the mere 
quantity of the salacious stuff that was printed killed 
any thought of its quality. At that same time, however, 
our magazine, rather than our book literature, was ut- 
terly dominated by the desires and tastes of the American 



72 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

girl. It was an extraordinary paradox. Books spilled 
salacity from the women and the womanists ; magazines 
offered pap to those on the verge of womanhood. Dis- 
criminating readers were disgusted at the reign of filth 
on the one hand, and at the namby-pambiness on the 
other. Here it was the shrieking sisterhood that flung 
its sex at us ; there it was the intelligence of the Young 
Person — the Matinee Girl, the Backfisch, the American 
Girl, call her what you will ! — that was exclusively catered 
to, and so inflicted itself on the rest of us. It was this 
condition of our magazine literature that once stirred 
Gertrude Atherton to the remark that to succeed in Amer- 
ican letters one must needs be a eunuch. She forgot what 
her own sex had done to prove that nymphomania was the 
best training for production of a " best seller." 

The gulf between the shamelessness of some of the 
women and the false shame of the men; between the 
strong, not to say high, meat in the books, and the Mel- 
lin's Food in the magazines, was bridged by the work of 
Le Gallienne. A certain story about petticoats by this 
writer can still be remembered pleasantly enough. It 
had its prettinesses ; it showed a delicate, graceful art, 
and some tender fancy; yet it had in it much that was 
unhealthy, much that showed its author's brain overloaded 
with physical phrases and physical facts. Those un- 
healthy tendencies increased from year to year until they 
finally became the features of this author's work. He 
took to beating the thinnest of plots still thinner by ir- 
ritating assumption of mentorship that was merely the 
method of Thackeray strained through a smaller mind. 
The air of taking the public into his confidence resulted 
not only in putting one utterly out of patience with a 
ridiculous pose, but in destroying any hope of reality 
there might have been about the stories themselves. It 
was all like painted and powdered marionettes worked by 
a clown. And such sweet and naughty persons as those 
Le Gallienne creatures were ! They tried so hard to make 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 73 

much of souls and of things spiritual, and of the finer 
sides of love, and succeeded only in advertising the fleshly 
bias of their author! It was all such mild dilution, such 
smug yet shamefaced wickedness ! 

I specially recall one out of the several unhappy young 
women whom Le Gallienne used as masks for his infatua- 
tion with the bodily aspects of love. She was English, 
and her name was Isabel. Her affair with Theophil took 
the record, I think, for speed in affairs of the heart ; four 
minutes was the official time. Theophil was a clergyman 
of vague non-conformity, a passion for Morris wall-paper 
and the verses of Rossetti; he was engaged to another 
young person named Jenny, but that mattered little to 
either Theophil or Isabel. Isabel gave lectures, such time 
as she was not reciting " The Blessed Damozel." 

Having stolen away from Jenny one day Theophil met 
Isabel at a little station in the country, and they took 
each other's hands and walked for miles and miles without 
saying a word. It was just as well, you see, that Isabel 
was English; one can't quite see an American girl taking 
that wordless walk. After having walked the woods those 
aforesaid miles and miles, I regret to say that Isabel per- 
mitted herself the indiscretion of lying down on the 
green earth with him. Blush not, good people ! Are you 
not aware that this sort of thing was Le Gallienne's pet 
type of near-devilishness ? They lay down on the green 
earth — yes ; but after that they merely gazed " on each 
other, hour after hour." Which seems, somehow, to have 
been an abuse of the green earth. It was just one of 
this author's nice little ways. He liked to pretend mod- 
esty and drag in the fleshly, and to use the symbols 
of the physical to describe what is innocuous and in- 
nocent. When a girl was pure, she was, to him, " all un- 
minted woman." In the matter of the linen Jenny's mother 
had been laying by for the wedding, he made a point 
of telling us that " at last there is quite a snowdrift 
of fair linen for Jenny and Theophil to lie in." 



74 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Just about that time Theophil was preferring the green 
earth and Isabel; that little touch about the fair linen 
made the proper artistic contrast. As for the interesting 
affair on the green earth, we were left in expectancy only 
for a few moments, in which the author offered some ab- 
surd arguments against kissing, and in which, also, the 
two lovers were supposed to be still only gazing at each 
other. Presently hunger attacked their silence and their 
stupidity. They " feasted together, wine and great 
grapes . . . they called each other silly, beautiful 
names, and they feigned sad little glad stories, and called 
the wood their home," and generally behaved themselves 
like inspired idiots, until " silence should sweep over them 
again, and a great kiss would leap out of the silence like 
a flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and 
they would hang together lost in an anguish of desire." 
Which, for two people who had lain together on the 
green earth for gazing purposes only, was doing pretty 
well. Then they called each other " Theophil " and 
" wife," and " a voice that seemed to be neither's and 
yet seemed to be the voice of both — a voice like a dove 
smothered in sweetness between their breasts — said ' Let 
us go deeper into the wood.' " 

After that, it was scarcely surprising to find the author 
referring to the relation between those two as a marriage. 
What he omitted, however, at the critical moment to ob- 
serve — and it seems a pity in view of his reference to the 
flame that lights up heaven from north to south, and also 
as a basis for comparison with the " warm thrill " that on 
a similar occasion " ran over the breezy field and its 
blood-red crowd of poppies," — was whether the wood, af- 
ter they had gone deeper into it, moved from east to west, 
or how. 

However, it is not science we expected from Le Galli- 
enne; it was pseudo-passion and pathos spelled with a 
" b." Of the latter he spilled much on Jenny, who still, 
while Theophil was deeper in the wood, fancied him en- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 75 

gaged to herself. But Jenny came on Theophil and 
Isabel one evening as they were locked in an embrace of 
which the " very attitude was home " — a sort of embrace 
that may, perhaps, be new to students of home training — 
and promptly went into a decline. She told Theophil 
what she had seen, and then proceeded to die on his 
hands. Her death gave Le Gallienne a chance to dis- 
cuss cremation and the ugliness of worms and many 
other physical corruptions of the sort he pretends ro- 
mantic. After Jenny's death Theophil gloomed a good 
deal, and had the horrors rather badly, but he was not 
yet out of the petticoat business safely. No Le Gallienne 
hero ever did escape the thrall of the feminine this side 
of death. 

The first young person that revived TheophiVs interest 
in life was the prima-donna of a Gaiety burlesque. His 
excuse was really great: he considered her the image of 
the late lamented Jenny! You see how well Le Gallienne 
had read his Gautier ? He gave you an idea from " Mile, 
de Maupin " in a Mellin's Food wrapper. Theophil went 
to see the Gaiety person play several nights in succession ; 
he sent his card to her, told her the story of his life, took 
supper with her, and after that — well, we know how it is 
with those broiled lobster suppers ! " He had leaned his 
head on a woman's kind shoulder, and she had let him talk 
and talk about Jenny; but her shoulder had been warm 
. . . and Theophil went to sleep that night with the 
taste of honey upon his lips." That was pretty good 
for a first interview; if he had seen that actress again 
one shudders to think what might not have happened. 
After leaning his head on the actress's breast Theophil 
had, it is true, his moments of remorse. Yet those mo- 
ments were too slight to stay his dreadful lust for fem- 
ininity. He rushed up to London to find Isabel and re- 
sume the episode of going deeper into the wood. But 
Isabel was out, and Theophil returned to his pulpit and 
his parish, until he caught cold and prepared to leave 



70 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

pulpit, parish and petticoats forever. He sent for Isabel, 
and they took to wine and to great grapes again, with 
a little poison on the side. Their exodus was quite gen- 
teel; there were no bloodstains on the carpet and no 
letters to relatives or newspapers ; yet it reminded one 
of those pictures in sensational journals under such head- 
lines as " Died in Each Other's Arms." 

That, with a benediction in the form of cheap moralis- 
ing, was the end of the story. The author had pretended 
the pose that he was introducing Romance in a new form ; 
but his unhealthy phrases are all we remembered. He 
brought a gasometer prominently into his first chapter, 
and alluded airily to Verlaine's poetry. But gasometers 
and the verses of Verlaine cannot kill the peculiar flavor 
of the Le Gallienne's phrases. An old stonemason's wife 
is described as having long had her wifehood " submerged 
in an immeasurable motherhood and the best of cooks." 
I never knew what that meant, but instinct warned me not 
to inquire too deeply. Theophil, again, had " a passion- 
ate intelligence." Jenny had in her " bottom drawer " 
with other " deposits of various kissed objects," " a sweet 
and rather naughty picture that must never be hung any- 
where but in their little sacred bedroom." 

Yes, those Le Gallienne books were much like that pic- 
ture ; in little sacred bedrooms they might not have done 
much harm ; but as books they were simply indecent ex- 
posures. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

If Richard Le Gallienne was a Liverpudlian, whose 
prose should have been translated into the masculjne be- 
fore being published, Gabriele d'Annunzio was an Italian 
who should never have been translated into English at 
all. The fictions he wrote, like some already alluded to, 
had no business being criticised by a mere writer ; a doctor 
was the more fit judge. D'Annunzio's variety of mental 
and physical diseases were enough to appal any mere 
scholiast; his romances must have been fascinating to 
medical practitioners. His descriptions of the most in- 
tricate moments of functional activity are only equaled 
by the surgical data in medical journals. 

The publishers may have been led to believe that they 
were filling a longfelt want when they printed his graphic 
account of the odors that offend, and the nausea that 
overtakes, women in pregnancy. There was evidently 
nothing our American reading women would not stand, 
whatever sex it emanated from, from one of themselves, 
from a man, or from a Le Gallienne. Artists differ 
mightily as to what constitutes the True Romance. Le 
Gallienne had found it in a gasometer. D'Annunzio found 
it in the saliva that festooned the lips of a sleeping 
baby. 

There are still those who vapor of the wonderful psy- 
chology of D'Annunzio. Let us hear no more of that. Of 
the poetry, or even of that in his prose which leads those 
who read him in the original to forgive him much else, I 
say nothing. But when it comes to attributing to him 
a great psychology, and to make that an excuse for 
translating into English those stories of his which, 
stripped of their musical syllables, disclose only the mere 
77 



78 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

unpleasant things in our Materia Medica, I think there 
should be protest. Judged by his novels, as we read 
them in English, D'Annunzio differed from most of our 
time's corrupt viveurs only in this particular: he insists 
on spreading the alpha and omega of his corruption over 
volumes of both prose and verse, in publicly dotting the 
I's of his indecencies, and in drawing royalties from ex- 
periences that more timid persons expiate through life- 
long devotion to healing springs. 

In one of the many biographies that D'Annunzio is- 
sued from time to time in guise of novels, was this de- 
scription, admirably suited, one is forced to believe, to the 
author himself : 

One of those literary men, affected by the saddest 
maladies of the mind, a libertine, cruelly curious, hardened 
by the habit of cold analysis of the warmest and most spon- 
taneous passions of the soul, accustomed to consider every 
human creature as a subject of purely psychological specula- 
tion, incapable of love, incapable of a generous action, of an 
abnegation, of a sacrifice, hardened in falsehood, enervated 
by disgust, lascivious, cynical, cowardly. 

It was in " The Intruder " that this description oc- 
curred. That book was typical of this author; we need 
consider no other to prove his place in our gallery of 
sex-mongers. " The Intruder " could have been summed 
up very briefly; some two or three hundred pages were 
devoted to descriptions of kindly and decent persons, 
while over 300 pages told of a disgusting hero's sickening 
analysis of a corrupt mind and a diseased body. But 
such brief summing up would hardly do for my case. To 
make an accusation is not enough ; there must be evidence 
more circumstantial, more internal. 

The chief actors in " The Intruder " were TuIUo, Juli- 
ana, who was Tullio's wife, and Filippo, who seduced Ju- 
liana. Beginning with the lady, we learned that she was 
as white as her night-dress, wore ash-colored stockings, 



Women, woManists and manners 79 

used crab-apple blossom perfume, and was given to 
spasms. For the spasms we must not blame her; any 
woman with the kind of husband she had, is to be ex- 
cused even worse than spasms. Tullio was one of the 
choicest flowers of corruption that any ever so depraved 
a pen has yet painted. He had committed almost all the 
detailed infractions into which the Seventh Commandment 
is divisible; and to make matters worse he maundered 
about himself. He regretted himself for over 300 pages. 
He spared the public not one iota of detail in recounting 
the many sessions he had with Messrs. Remorse, Regret & 
Co., Unlimited. 

Tullio had a way with the women. In view of the fact 
that his limbs " had acquired an extraordinary flexibility, 
a sort of illusory fluidity that prevented him from notic- 
ing the obstacle presented by the clothes," this is not to 
be wondered at. A man of that sort is sure to have at- 
tractions for the other sex. Also, he had intestine dis- 
cords. Intestine discords, I believe, are no longer good 
form in polite society. But Tullio was an Italian, and 
there, perhaps, divorce and appendicitis have not yet 
ousted intestine discords. Whatever they are, they must 
be disagreeable, for Tullio was an extremely disagreeable 
person. No man who could dissect, to the tune of 300 
pages, his marital infidelities, his campaign to reconquer 
his wife's affections, and his murder of the child born to 
that wife through the one step aside by which she was 
enabled to deal him as much anguish as he had dealt her 
in a lifetime of libertinage — no such man could possibly 
be termed pleasant. To call him the " ideologist, the 
analyst, the sophist of an epoch of decadence ... a 
violent and passionate person conscious of himself, in 
whom the hypertrophy of certain cerebral centres rendered 
impossible the co-ordination necessary to the normal state 
of mind " was simply to waste, with D'Annunzio, a deal 
of specious phraseology on an utter rotter. 

Tullio had a way of spending weeks elsewhere, with 



80 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

other women, and returning home to the consoling 
thought that his wife was a sister to him. That was, I 
believe, the first instance in modern fiction, where the 
being-a-sister-to-him had more of a sting for the woman 
than for the man. For one woman, Teresa, this hero had 
a particularly " sad passion." When with her he took 
" such violent plunges into the abyss of indulgence that 
for many days after he lay in a stupefied state." Yet he 
was displeased, awaking from one of those trances, to dis- 
cover that his wife was about to present him with a son 
as a mark of her temporary affection for another. So 
deep were the sinks of illogic to which D'Annunzio would 
drive us. Strindberg in " The Father " did not so spoil 
his tragic argument. 

As for Filippo, the gentleman who had done Tullio the 
justice of seducing Juliana, it was of him that the para- 
graph which I quoted as applicable to D'Annunzio was 
supposedly descriptive. Otherwise details in his case were 
meagre. In Tullio' s mind Filippo figured as constantly 
" dripping with perspiration." This quality of his, taken 
with his having placed horns on Tullio's head, naturally 
made Tullio anxious for Filippo' s welfare. When he 
found that Filippo was suffering from " a progressive 
paralysis of the medulla oblongata " he had great light- 
ness of heart ; and the spectacle of Filippo having aphasia 
and agraphia rejoiced him exceedingly. He was so glad 
about it all that he went home and killed a baby. 

What was there, in such stuff as that, to support the 
theory of the poetry and the psychology in D'Annunzio? 
This was merely the old device of using the unpleasant 
things in medicine and anatomy and giving them a lit- 
erary guise. Old was the trick when he put into the re- 
pentant Tullio's mouth the assertion, made to his wife, 
" You were in my house, while I sought you afar off." 
That was once again the good old theory, advanced by 
Theophile Gautier, that many a courtesan had, in men's 
imagination, done duty for a princess. A truly popular 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 81 

idea, that, with all these bedroom reporters ; Le Gallienne 
used it; they all used it. Perhaps Gautier took it from 
the Greeks ; no matter ; it is Gautier's version of it that 
was most artistic and most memorable. Certainly D'An- 
nunzio's version was worth only censure. Gautier was a 
genius in phrase and suggestion ; D'Annunzio split the 
hairs of fleshliness into a horrid woof of decay. There 
seemed nothing sacred to his mania for analysis. Like 
this book about " The Intruder " there were many others 
from his pen ; in each of them he made some unpalatable 
disclosure or other. He was not always content with ex- 
hibiting himself in various guises of corruption ; he even 
revealed with utter shamelessness all the innermost secrets 
of such great souls as had come into his life. 

What a passion for phrases may result in we have seen 
in more than one case. D'Annunzio's passion for phrases 
of a medical sort made only for the reader's disgust. 
Le Gallienne's preoccupation with the physical, ladylike 
though it pretended to be, made all his phrases smell 
offensively. In the case of Edgar Saltus we had the spec- 
tacle of an author drunken with his own phrases. 

I hesitate to include Mr. Saltus with those others. Yet, 
if I do so, it is partly that we may leave the whole sub- 
ject with as clean a taste in the mind as possible. Though 
Mr. Saltus put himself long ago with the writers about 
sex, he always was so fine an artist, so careful of style, 
that, had the women and the womanists been like him in 
their artistry, I would have had no such philippic as this 
to write. He serves, toward those others, as a shining 
light, as a writer who has always striven to write beau- 
tifully, — latterly, alas, too beautifully, as I shall show. 

In the eighties Mr. Saltus was of those who spurred 
the general American interest in sex stories. His " Tris- 
tram Varick " and " Mr. Incoul " — I clip something from 
those titles — were, in their day, sensations. They were 
fused out of examples from the French and out of Mr. 



82 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Saltus' passion for clever phrases. That passion, later, 
was to threaten his destruction. After the earlier novels 
he wrote essays, again novels, — some of them somewhat 
unpleasantly autobiographic — stories that revived the 
glories of Rome, or gave of Mary of Magdala as vivid an 
image as Wilde gave of Salome. He gave us a popular 
and fascinating version of Schopenhauer. The years, in 
brief, delivered him of some fiction, of a little stately 
poetry, and of much prose in essay form, in which latter 
appeared the seed of what is now nothing less than a 
sacrifice made for style. In the stories of sex so far con- 
sidered it was the lack of great art, of great style, that 
left them futile. In the case of Edgar Saltus we had the 
other extreme ; style was too exclusively his preoccupa- 
tion. 

Always addicted to the paradox, to the phrase for 
phrase's sake, to the sentence that glitters yet is not 
gold, this author had been gradually letting go the hold 
he had on logic, upon proportion, and upon the simple 
enunciation of simple things. By the time he compiled, 
from the dry and foreign documents in our libraries, his 
" Historia Amoris " and his " Lords of the Ghostland," 
he was become hopelessly mazed by the clamant meaning- 
lessness of his own too brilliant sentences. For some years 
past his most disinterested friends must often have asked 
whither this author's piling of phrase upon phrase, heed- 
less of either sense or nonsense, must eventually tend. If 
we put ourselves upon Mr. Saltus' own plane ; if we search 
the old and jog the new in an equally mad quest for a 
phrase; if we borrow the jargon of the advocate and the 
alienist to fit the case of a prosateur intoxicated with the 
froth of his own exuberance, we may declare that by the 
time he wrote " The Lords of the Ghostland " Mr. Saltus 
was a dervish dancing in his prose. 

We had to go even farther. Perusal of the book paved 
the way for verbal vertigo in the reader. One found 
oneself juggling with syllables that meant nothing, though 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 83 

alliterative, coining phrases that sounded magnificent yet 
had nothing to do with the case, and propounding the ob- 
vious with an impertinent air of discovery. 

Just as Mr. Saltus in previous volumes had made pal- 
atable various old philosophies and histories, including 
that of love, so this book, that marked the most tragic 
point reached by the preciosity of his prose, had vague 
intention to be a history of the divinities in history and 
legend. The ancient origins of ancient creeds were mar- 
shaled, commented on, and made backgrounds against 
which Mr. Saltus let off his alliterative and paradoxic 
fireworks. There was neither beginning nor end to these 
chapters. That, our author would doubtless assure us, 
is the test of the most triumphant art. Well, artistic 
may have been the intent ; the result was certainly quite 
useless. The publisher was shrewd enough to forewarn 
one that there was " no attempt to be exhaustive or to 
prove anything." One found that out for oneself soon 
enough; yet the publisher's admission showed that his 
conscience was not yet hopelessly seared by the lightning- 
like flashes of Mr. Saltus's phrases, which, unlike the light- 
ning, were equally without cause or effect. No ; assuredly 
Mr. Saltus was not exhaustive. We were led through a 
wilderness of names, yet what most impressed us was Mr. 
Saltus's joy in the many strangely sweet syllables he re- 
galed us with, and the hard glitter he had achieved out 
of all this posy gathered from other men's flowers. Yes, 
here was the trick of glitter, there was no doubt of that ; 
but he was assuredly himself the chief est victim; in the 
resultant blindness he had lost all sense of proportion — 
he was blind, hopelessly, utterly blind-drunk with his own 
brilliance and his own music. We could see him reeling, 
still spouting phrases, incoherent — wonderful to watch, 
wonderful to listen to, provided you were willing to pay 
for simply an exhibition of virtuosity. 

If that was what you liked — just a show of rhetorical 
contortionism — " The Lords of the Ghostland " was the 



84 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

book for your money. Or, again, if you wanted merely 
the names of things so that you might do a little vague 
juggling of your own, to impress the Harlem entourage, 
or the little Turkish corner in West Philadelphia — just 
the book for your money! You got a splendid smatter- 
ing of names of gods and creeds, you were enabled to fling 
broadcast such allusions and hints as made the Rubaiyat 
seem a somewhat vulgar and topical ditty. But if you 
really wished to know the why and wherefore, if you 
wanted to pass beyond the portals of the temple, you had 
to leave Mr. Saltus, still babbling, musically, ceaselessly, 
enchantingly, but — babbling — at the gate. He stood 
there, reeling and babbling, the slave of his own syllables. 
That book was the final confession of his defeat by the 
defects of his virtuosity. What he had once done elo- 
quently and admirably in his " Philosophy of Disenchant- 
ment " and his " Anatomy of Negation " he attempted 
again ; as he had once given us popular and fascinating 
versions of Schopenhauer and other philosophers, so now 
he thought to give us an equally successful version of 
what legend or history have dryly told us of those things 
that men and gods believed when yet the world was warm 
in youth. Instead he had given us but sound and fury, 
and left us only the vision of himself, like to the Semi- 
ramis of Edwin Markham, babbling " on an ancient road 
of Hell." We thought of him only, to change those lines 
a little, as 

" Babbling all night, and when his voice was dead 
His weary lips beat on without a sound." 

Perhaps, however, we wrong Mr. Saltus, in supposing 
that a simple enunciation of things simple, or even ab- 
struse, still appealed to him. His interpretation of the 
fine old Art-for-Art's-sake principle had perhaps brought 
him to a point where simplicity and logic seemed equally 
absurd to him. Well, taking that point of view, we had 
to admit that, if art was a something intangible, unin- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 85 

telligible, and purposeless, Mr. Saltus had written one of 
the most artistic books ever produced in America. Nearly 
all our other writers suffered from too little art; Mr. 
Saltus suffered from too much of it. This book of his 
achieved no purpose; it was without either time, space 
or dimension. It swung you high upon a wondrous vol- 
ume of sound, and — left you suspended there in the upper 
ether, to perish of intellectual inanition. 

A history of the ideal, the sub-title told us, was what 
our author had conceived. It was a history of nothing 
save his own pathologic and phraseologic condition. His 
chapters on Brahma, Ormuzd, Ammon-Ra, Bel-Marduk, 
Jehovah, Zeus, Jupiter and The Ne Plus Ultra revealed 
only the diligence with which Mr. Saltus had searched the 
libraries, so that out of their most sibilant and trumpet- 
ing names he could concoct a medium through which to 
display his own virtuosity. Not one single chapter in 
the book could we read and assimilate a definite idea, 
nor yet the outline of a single spent ideal. We gathered 
only the pungent perfume of the incense Mr. Saltus swung 
unceasingly before himself, the God of Phrases. If, for a 
vestige of a second, he fancied himself becoming lucid, he 
forthwith smashed all chance of that with some climacteric 
clause so parabolic as to be the utterest nonsense. 

What, one wonders, may a " somnambulist of history " 
be? Mr. Saltus constantly referred to such a person. 
Was he of the Froissart or Froude school, Boccaccio or 
Boswell? " Somnambulist of history? " Had not Mr. 
Saltus, in that phrase, with unconscious irony hit off his 
own method of walking through the paths blazed by other 
historians? Referring to legends used by Richard Wag- 
ner, Mr. Saltus wrote: 



Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from 
their secular slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their 
Occidental apotheosis, and, it may be, on steps of song, 
mounted to the ideal where Zeevan Akerene muses. 



86 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

That was a typical sentence. At one stage of it our 
author saw that fearsome thing, simplicity, confronting 
him, and therewith lucidity, and the danger of having 
uttered something intelligible. So he desperately flung 
the closing phrases at his sentence, dabbed on a spectac- 
ular bit of nomenclature, looked at his handiwork and 
knew it was good; he had successfully fogged the issue 
with some sounding syllables. 

As a " story of beautiful illusions " Mr. Saltus's pro- 
tagonists presented the book. It robbed one, instead, of 
the illusion that Mr. Saltus might still be saved from the 
fate of being a prestidigitateur of prose. 

Yet style, though it may claim a victim here and there, 
is still the saving salt of letters, the lack of which is so 
conspicuously our American defect. If those writers 
about sex had known what style was, they had never 
written stuff which, as you have seen, made only for ridi- 
cule. Style is far more than a mere manner of saying 
things ; it includes selection of the things to say ; the sense 
of form is as much a part of style as is the sense of 
rhythm. Our writers about sex, as our writers about so- 
ciety, rarely had so much of style as, in any international 
judgment, would award them even the " honorable men- 
tion " accorded minor artists. In the period when the 
novels we thought sensational concerned themselves exclu- 
sively with sex, art was ever inconspicuous behind absurd- 
ity ; I have tried to prove that by several examples. It 
was the same when stories about Society engaged our at- 
tention ; as you shall see later. In the more serious domain 
of criticism, of what used to be called belles Uttres, our 
American achievements — as you shall also see — have been 
so slight as to be hardly considerable. When we were still 
on England's literary leash we let England provide our 
" best sellers " ; when we began to flood the markets with 
our own productions we overlooked the quality that might 
have given those productions rank as literature: style. I 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 87 

have not here tried to point out all the defects in all the 
" best sellers " of the last two decades ; that would have 
been too hideous and interminable a task; I have merely 
chosen salient examples of certain paramount tendencies. 
How our books reeked with nastiness while our magazines 
pretended puritanism, I have already pointed out. That 
our novelists portraying American Society are hardly out 
of leading strings yet, is to be pointed out later. That 
our one great writer is, as far as the general literary 
acceptance of our continent goes, virtually unheard of, 
I shall also show. Finally, also, some reasons will be 
assigned; reasons other than our lack of style. 

Meanwhile, since Mr. Saltus has brought us so far, let 
us, leaving for a time the ladies and the ladies-men, con- 
sider style a little. 



CHAPTER SIX. 

Style, to the artist in life and in literature, is at once 
a window and a mask. 

To appreciate the value of masks we need be con- 
cerned ever so slightly with all that makes for beautiful 
in life and in letters. The mask, properly applied, may 
be a symbol of the soul. Just as the dandy may express 
himself by means of costume, so can the hidden spirit, too 
long cloaked by the mobile ugliness of the human face, 
display itself at last in an appropriate mask. How ab- 
surd are some of the assimilations of Nature ! Here we 
find a burglar with the face of a divine; here a madonna 
with the visage of a vixen. The anarchist has often the 
look of the conventionalised clergyman ; and the poet ap- 
pears, by a dreadful irony, in the visual image of a 
banker. Only on the stage is any effort made to restrict 
the vagaries and paradox of nature. There the villain 
has his proper label; to confuse him with the hero you 
must have been brought up exclusively on a diet of na- 
ture's personages. From the true artistic mean, however, 
the theatre's mummeries stray as far as does nature. 
Only in the popular masking at time of carnival in Latin 
towns are proper revelations of the human soul possible. 
Yet, in point of taste, our Louisiana metropolis still has 
far to go. I remember that Venice, one carnival, put on 
the characters and colors of Balzac's " Human Comedy." 
New Orleans, in the first year of the twentieth century, 
took inspiration for its pageant from Marie Corelli's 
" Ardath." The gulfs of taste that lie between those two 
masquerades would take a book to bridge. 

If masks might serve a purpose in actual ugly human 
life, how much more might they not improve our litera- 
ture! In that part of our literature called fiction, which 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 89 

has almost wiped out the other provinces, we find as 
monotonous an ugliness as you may see whenever you note 
critically the countenance of any human mob. Our tre- 
mendous output of novels is equaled only by its barren- 
ness in all that makes for distinction. The printing- 
presses flood us with books ; the flood is as muddy as a 
spring freshet on the Mississippi ; there is a vast bustle 
of writing and reading; and the artistic total is hardly 
visible. 

We are deluged with facts ; fancy is to seek. Our novels 
of the day are written exactly in the language of the 
Man in the Street; that is the secret of our artistic fail- 
ure. It is all on the plane of the average intellect. If 
you remind me that I began my book declaring that it 
is the average intellect we must not lose sight of, I reply 
that while we may give him the life he knows, the char- 
acters he moves among, one need not use his own hap- 
hazard language. Nor need one leave him to wallow 
forever in his half-culture. Literary style does not pre- 
clude the human interest ; keeping in mind the Man in 
the Street one still should hope to lift his taste wher- 
ever possible. 

Books written in language that every Tom, Dick and 
Harry is capable of, add nothing to our artistic ad- 
vancement. Truth to nature, and near appeal to the 
general human heart, will not save a book that is keyed 
down to the vulgar tongue. No such book, even if it 
survive, can ever be said to have enriched the art of 
writing, to have brought a nation nearer to an ideal. 
One can deny our age nothing of vigor, of fecundity. 
The eye tires in observing the speed with which books 
appear and disappear; all this mass of printed matter is 
quite expressionless, there is no style in any of it ; it is 
written so that all may understand, and none of it is 
worth understanding. Not in a dozen of the popular 
American novels of the period can you show me a genuine 
sense of style. 



90 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Mere decency > demands that a mask be put on this 
appalling exposition of our average culture. It is not 
the survival of the fittest, but the survival of the average 
that we should dread. Our age is terribly oppressed by 
an extension of average culture ; a culture that is to real 
culture what the demi-monde is to the proper world. 
Extension of an average culture means arrested intel- 
lectual development. The rabid Philistine was not nearly 
so dangerous to art as the undiscriminating young woman 
whom the pictures of C. D. Gibson and his imitators bred 
in horrid profusion throughout the land. Whether it 
was Gibson one year, or Wallace Morgan another; the 
speed with which our land began to teem with young 
women patterned exactly on the models of those artists in 
black-and-white, proved once again the truth of Wilde's 
saying that Nature copies Art. Wilde probably took 
that from Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann ; but 
— these endless chains of human thought are rarely profit- 
able. Those " girls " proved, too, how essentially imita- 
tive is the average of taste in America ; never was there 
a land so rich in beautiful women, and so poor in orig- 
inality of adornment ; year after year our women — the 
richest in opportunities in all the world — look as if they 
were poured out of one and the same mold. In the art of 
being beautiful, as in literature, it is style we lack. 

Those young women, without style about themselves, 
intellectually mere echoes, typified the average attitude 
toward letters. They called each " popular " novel, 
" perfectly elegant," and talked of it as familiarly as if 
it were a grandmother. The fact that most of the suc- 
cessful books were written in language that called for no 
thought in the reader, appealed strongly to these heed- 
less persons. Protesting they were " so fond of books 
and reading " they debased the true coin of our letters 
measurably. 

The disciples of realism will protest that it is neces- 
sary to hold the mirror up to nature ; it is a pet phrase 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 91 

of theirs. But realism is a mirror that reminds us how 
ugly we are, and only the fewest of us are so vain as to 
need that reminder. Masks, style, give us opportunities 
to reveal the beauties nature has conspired to hide. The 
true artist must masquerade. This masquerade has not 
always been called so ; preciosity has been the more usual 
term. Preciosity ! One sees the clumsy weapons of the 
average American reviewer coming out at sight and 
thought of that word. Preciosity, they will tell you, and 
have always been avid to tell wherever there were listeners, 
is the bane of vitality and vigor. Have these persons 
never seen the gardeners clipping their hedges in spring- 
time? There is such a thing as too rank a vigor, too 
great a danger of weeds choking the proper crop. The 
pruning-knife of preciosity should be applied to our liter- 
ature. Our language is not so rich that it will not benefit 
by weeding. Preciosity is the artist's fairest mask; it is 
the complete expression of himself. He ceases to be 
merely a mouthpiece of and for the common intelligence. 
Preciosity, in the past, has had its ups and downs ; 
invariably it has been the successor to, and savior of, 
periods of universal half-culture. Often enough the su- 
perficial affectations of preciosity have been fit for ridi- 
cule ; yet Moliere's satire was no more pertinent than 
would be a similar reflection on the absurd little precieuses 
whom but now I mentioned as calling all literature " per- 
fectly elegant." Preciosity has never been ridiculous save 
where it has been that of the under-educated or the pro- 
vincial. The precious, however odious they may seem to 
the indolent eyes of such as are content with an easy 
mean of intelligence, stand for invention, for individu- 
ality, and for non-conformity. What is extravagant in 
preciosity will not survive; what is pedantic will disap- 
pear in the maw of the culture-devouring provincial, and 
thereby lose whatever of singular value it had. There 
remain but the fanciful and aristocratic qualities. Affec- 
tations though they may seem, these are the things in 



92 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

preciosity that must lift our American literature from 
its mobbish average. Preciosity may push into the arena, 
now crowded with all that is common and commonly ex' 
pressed, a stylist. That stylist might outlive some of his 
contemporaries. 

The public should be weaned from the fetish of mere 
noise and numbers. Novels are exactly on the plane of 
newspapers ; not only is their circulation advertised sim- 
ilarly ; their language is quite the same. Only an alert 
ear for the vulgar taste and the vulgar speech is neces- 
sary to write one of our popular novels. Most of these 
novelists write alike. The artist ever tries to write dif- 
ferently. If fate has given him a visible and audible 
cloak which makes him akin to all average humanity, 
he does what he can to correct the fault ; he puts up the 
mask. The prose in our newspapers proves the horrid 
average in our thought and expression ; they are all writ- 
ten in the same unlovely language. Where is the per- 
sonal style of a Greeley, a Raymond, a Prentice, a Pix- 
ley, or a Bierce? Journalism is content with the easy and 
common phrase. Preciosity exhausts the nuances of our 
vocabulary. The normal, as a national attribute, degen- 
erates into the immobile. Revolutionists more often push 
forward, not over, the Scheme of Things. The revolu- 
tionists in our case must be artists in preciosity. 

Rather than descend to the vulgar level of our prevail- 
ing literary expression, the true artist should take to 
the digging of ditches. These, at least, he can dig — 
and, indeed, is comically likely to ! — with quite an indi- 
vidual style. To ask a really fine artist to descend to the 
monotone of our average literature, is as if a euphuist, 
a person of refinement and sense of beauty, were to eschew 
his proper speech and jabber Creole with the Creoles, 
cracker with the Crackers, and New England with the 
Down Easters. Originally euphuism was but exuberance 
in a newly realised sense of our tongue's richness. Eu- 
phuism and reticence are the parts of preciosity we most 






WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 93 

need. Both are artistic masks. Shakespeare is the great 
euphuist of all time. The tropic splendor with which 
euphuism embroiders language is as a painted, chromatic 
mask; the sombre tints of our average tongue need this, 
just as our half -culture with its excursions into the pe- 
dantic and the polysyllabic needs the restraint of reti- 
cence. 

Walter Pater, it has been contended, was not strictly a 
disciple of preciosity. For my part I think him the most 
perfect master of that art in our tongue; both his eu- 
phuism and his reticence are admirable. Mere affectation 
is not necessarily a quality of preciosity; it is an attri- 
bute that preciosity's enemies conspire to force into it. 
Pedantry and profusion are both to be avoided; I inter- 
pret preciosity more narrowly. It has, for me, reticence, 
music and simplicity. Behind it is a conscience that feels 
the pull of the ideal; a sense of responsibility toward the 
language; and aversion to cheapening, for the mob's 
entertainment, all one's finest views of life. Bliss Car- 
man, who arranged the fabled phrase of Commodore Van- 
derbilt to the tune of ". . . and let the Age be 
damned ! " once admitted to me that, were he able, he 
would write in another language. That was his some- 
what excessive expression against the odiousness of pen- 
and-ink as it has become the medium of half-culture. 

The amateur of letters who can find an ounce of style 
in any random dozen of current American novels is either 
much to be congratulated or much to be pitied. To 
quantity, to story, to realism, we have sacrificed every- 
thing. Style was nowhere. The nearer a novelist wrote 
to the average tongue, the more and the louder were the 
epithets flung at him by the professional flatterers who 
represented American criticism at its average. As a re- 
sult, our writing is as commonplace as the conversations 
in the Subway. Excepting Saltus, the only approaches 
to style were made by such men as Pater, Hewlett, Henry 
Harland and Henry James, out of all who gained gen- 



94. THEIR DAY IN COURT 

eral recognition. Not one of those mentioned is strictly 
an American. The very fact that Mr. James, himself 
once an American, is nowadays assiduously imitated by 
another American, not of his own sex, is only proof of 
my contention that originality of style in America has 
been choked by the riotous growth of writing down to 
the public, instead of up to the art of literature. These 
steps in imitation would be amusing if they were not so 
saddening; when James went abroad to study Turgenieff 
(as we may recall from the old George Moore jibe) 
Howells stayed at home and studied James ; now it is 
Edith Wharton who is more Jacobite than James him- 
self. 

Asked to name an American stylist one could certainly 
name no popular novelist. Style is not everything; one 
pretends nothing so absurd. But a corrective for the 
opulent banality of our written English becomes annually 
more imperative. Into the vastitude of our half-culture 
there must come, if we are to rise from our too great 
democracy of taste, a refinement and sharpening of ap- 
preciation that only a touch of preciosity can bring. To 
resent preciosity because it is preciosity is as illogical 
as to say that the bald must never wear wigs. Our liter- 
ature grows diffuse and ugly ; the recklessness with which 
it dissipates its magnificent opportunities has seamed and 
scarred its countenance; the hard, stale, vulgar look 
which all commonness breeds is deeply stamped upon it. 
There is crying need for the masks of preciosity, of style. 

Only in the splendid reticence, the majestic selective- 
ness of style, may American literature gather force for a 
work of art or two to outlive all our present generation 
of popular novels. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

If the subject of style led us away from the ladies a 
little, that was, in view of their general lack of it, not 
so easily avoidable. Both in their attire and in their 
literary art, our ladies were never distinguished for over- 
much individuality or originality. In logic, then, we re- 
turn to the ladies after we have paid our adieux to style. 

In the period over which my critical activities have 
brought me, the features most worth attention were the 
novels of sex and the novels of manners. What share 
the ladies had in letting the reading public into such 
secrets of sex as no man had cared to reveal, we have 
already seen. In considering stories about manners, it 
is only fair to give all possible attention to the ladies' 
share. Under novels of manners you are to understand 
what people have been wont to call historical novels, 
novels of international marriage, and novels dealing with 
human society in the large rather than in the Almanach 
de Gotha sense. 

One can hardly conceive of any single aspect of our 
Anglo-Saxon society that the novelists, male and female, 
have not by now told us about. If quantity had any- 
thing to do with it, it would be easy for the twenty-first 
century to see our manners and habits by simply reading 
our novels. Yet the fact remains that until John Gals- 
worthy began to write, the real character of English 
thought under Edward VII had never been recorded ac- 
curately ; and that about American society we have noth- 
ing but very vague and transient impressions of certain 
temporary and formative periods. After the novels of 
Edgar Fawcett, describing certain stages in New York's 
social life, there came nothing at all that was worth mem- 
95 



96 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ory until, at this present writing, a number of promising 
young men show signs of seeing the magnitude of the 
subject. Young men, hereafter to be considered at 
greater length, as : Winston Churchill, David Graham 
Phillips and Robert Chambers. 

If quantity, to say it again, could have done it, the 
social historian of the future would have had plenty of 
documents to go by. The ladies contributed largely to 
this quantity ; so largely that for my present purpose I 
must choose examples very warily, lest there be room in 
my book for nothing else. Again I would warn my reader 
that nothing of the godlike and academic is to be ex- 
pected; you will find only a set of fleeting impressions. 
Upon my personality and my prejudices certain books, 
in every domain of letters, made certain impressions that 
formed, eventually, my opinion of our literature at large. 
Some of those impressions, with all their qualities of per- 
sonality and prejudice, you are to have repeated here. 

The fiction about society written by women that seems 
to me noteworthy was of many diverse trends. There 
were the social tracts of Mrs. Humphry Ward; the 
pseudo-romances of Marie Corelli; and the international 
stories of John Oliver Hobbes and Gertrude Atherton. 
If we consider these, we should be both instructed and 
entertained. It has ever been one of my critical tenets 
that if you cannot entertain the public, to attempt in- 
structing it is madness. My pages can be read seriously 
enough ; this, as so much else, is all " in the eye of the 
beholder " ; but when they cease to entertain you have 
only to say so, and I shall know that I have outlived my 
usefulness. The philosopher and the fool are equals when 
the clock strikes. 

Let us begin with Mrs. Humphr}' Ward. 

In an age of women novelists, Mrs. Ward was very gen- 
erally held one of the novel's foremost protagonists. Yet 
that was not my notion of the novel; what she wrote 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 97 

were simply tracts; she represented the Salvation Army 
in fiction. 

Once a tractarian, always a tractarian. Only the texts 
changed ; never the tractarian manner. 

When Mr. Gladstone was still alive and allowed to 
spread his tastelessness in English literature, the tracts 
of Mrs. Ward concerned themselves with religion. She 
spelled orthodoxy for us with such infinite pains that all 
the artistic nations of Europe wept over the dulness she 
had added to British life. " Robert Elsmere " is as dead 
now as the soap that was given away with it; but the 
ball of bourgeois tractarianism that it set in motion spun 
on through England and America until quite recent years. 
The human soul struggling between a convent and world- 
liness attracted the art of a George Moore and a John 
Oliver Hobbes, for instance; but those writers occasion- 
ally produced a novel. Mrs. Ward always wrote tracts. 

Eventually Mrs. Ward deserted theology, and engaged 
in social tractarianism. It was still orthodoxy versus 
heterodoxy, but her subject was society; she remained the 
disputant and the dogmatist — in a word, the truly Brit- 
ish tractarian. That she was skilful in her chosen field 
we cannot deny. And never more skilful than in the tract 
she called " The Marriage of William Ashe." 

In that book she painted the pageant of orthodox 
British aristocracy with a vigor that marked her as one 
of the most successful of those writers who live by preach- 
ing from the platform of the social insider. She wrote 
always as the insider, describing the delectable inner cir- 
cles, firstly, for the self-satisfaction of the other insiders ; 
secondly, and perhaps chiefly, for the arousement of am- 
bition, envy and imitation among the outsiders. Above 
all, there was never any dangerously new point of view; 
never a glint of the comic side to all that life as John 
Galsworthy has more recently disclosed; never anything 
but reverent discussion of the orthodoxy or heterodoxy 
in a social system that the reader was expected to con- 



98 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

sider, with all its faults, as the finest and firmest in the 
world. 

The skill with which Mrs. Ward displayed what passes 
for upper-class British life constituted the major part of 
her appeal to Americans. Mrs. Wharton eventually 
copied the trick; having copied also the style of Henry 
James, she persuaded Americans that she wrote about 
American society, not only as one having authority, but 
as an artist in prose. We are somewhat easily persuaded 
in matters of this sort ; our so-called critics only increase 
our willingness to be humbugged. We imagined we were 
reading novels when Mrs. Ward was handing us her little 
tracts on the social life. What finally deceived us was 
the glamour with which she swung before our democratic 
eyes the traditionally aristocratic British life. 

In " The Marriage of William Ashe " we were as con- 
stantly breathing the air of English tradition and as 
constantly surrounded by great personages as in the 
novels of Marie Corelli we were forever in the company 
of persons " famous throughout Europe." Mrs. Ward 
was rather more deliberately a gentlewoman, dealing more 
obviously in orthodox originals, rather than in paste imi- 
tations ; but the object was quite the same. Juggle the 
phrases as you like — say Insiders and Outsiders, say 
snobs and swells — the object of such stories as these was 
the same ; it was to befog the proletariat mind and the 
snob mind with a sense of the magnificence of the English 
aristocratic tradition. In " Lady Rose's Daughter," for 
instance, if there was any story at all, it was one that 
had already been told several times ; its pretended plot 
was lifted bodily from a French classic; in its essentials 
it was simply a tract on social orthodoxy and its oppo- 
site. 

The English tradition, in things fashionable, was time 
and again painted for us so splendidly thai we might be 
the more poignantly touched by the opposing forces sup- 
posed to be making for its decay. Picture followed pic- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 99 

ture, each calculated to ensnare the unthinking, the out- 
sider, the snob, and the American — terms in a great many 
cases interchangeable. By such touches as a picture of 
a costume ball at an historic house, peopled with a motley 
and magnificent crowd, Mrs. Ward furthered the efficacy 
of her social tracts. It was as if she were a fashionable 
prophet, hymning the glories of the social kingdom of 
heaven. Always, in her fine crowds, were aristocratic and 
important personages. Here a famous lawyer stood 
among the motley, clad in the Lord Chancellor's garb of 
a great ancestor; here an ex- Viceroy of Ireland, with a 
son in the government, was magnificent in an Elizabethan 
dress, showing a jewel given to the founder of the house 
by Elizabeth's own hand ; next to him was a white-haired 
judge in the robes of Lord Gascoigne. All, we were told, 
showed in their gay complacent looks a clear revival of 
that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which 
came so strangely to an end on the ruins of which Na- 
poleon stood. It was the gay complacency, always, of 
aristocracy, of the tradition that goes daily and com- 
placently into the rich past. 

Yes, for all of Mrs. Ward, that complacency might 
have continued to humbug the world at large ; not until 
" The Country House " was written were readers asked 
to note the comedy and tragedy hidden under that com- 
placency and unsuspected by the complacent islanders 
themselves. 

Aristocracy, always aristocracy, was the refrain in 
these tracts ; an aristocracy capable of sheer delight in 
its own splendor, wealth and good looks. Though Eng- 
lish aristocracy might not have a certain dignity to be 
found in Latin lands, Mrs. Ward assured us that it had 
more personal beauty and more romance. In her motley 
and magnificent assemblages did she not present Stan- 
leys, Howards, Percys, Villierses, Butlers, Osbornes, and 
many other notable family flowers of England, all touched 
with history, and romance, and tradition? What Amer- 



100 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ican reader, wrapped in the rosy ambitions stirred by 
those glowing pageants, could have resisted their allure- 
ments? Lived there the American snob with soul so dead, 
who never to himself had said, this is my own, my native 
England? Mrs. Burton Harrison may have pretended 
irony when she wrote her " Anglomaniacs " ; but in effect 
her story helped rather than hindered the imitative ten- 
dencies in our American society. 

Those imitative tendencies were never played on more 
shrewdly than by Mrs. Humphry Ward. What, against 
the pages on pages of aristocratic pageantry she offered, 
were those slight ironic touches in which she exposed an- 
other side to the English tradition as in " Diana Mal- 
lery "? She presented one of even her lesser creatures, 
pretending to deplore their smallness, as " possessing that 
narrow but serviceable fund of human experience which 
the English landowner, while our English tradition sub- 
sists, can hardly escape if he will; he had acquired by 
mere living that for which his intellectual betters had 
often envied him — a certain shrewdness, certain instinct, 
as to both men and affairs, which were often of more 
service to him than finer brains to other people." Think 
of the appeal of that insistence on the landowner tradi- 
tion, in a country where the landowner is only just be- 
ginning his first taste of an aristocratic ether! Could 
one wonder at the American popularity of Mrs. Ward? 
The happy dream of a tradition based on mere being, on 
just living, just having happened: a Howard, a Percy, a 
Villiers, — how deftly she sketched that dream so that 
those worshiping beyond the social Paradise may wish 
to enter! Entrance cost but little — to a lively imagina- 
tion — only the price of one of Mrs. Ward's social tracts. 

England and the traditional English life — they ran 
like texts through these tracts. " All that they implied 
of custom and inheritance, of strength and narrowness, 
of cramping prejudice and stubborn force " was, we read^ 
very familiar, and, on the whole, very congenial, to one 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 101 

of Mrs. Ward's characters. If that aforesaid tradition, 
and the whole aristocratic atmosphere of it, did not be- 
come both familiar and congenial to her readers, it was 
not the author's fault. She kept the pedal down on all 
such passages ; her plots had no other text. Just the 
English tradition, and its opposite. She took one type 
formed by this tradition, and compared it to its violent 
opposite. She played British prejudice, narrowness and 
hypocrisy against French frankness and diablerie. 

She opposed the gaieties of Offenbach to the hymns 
of Dr. Watts. 

If she painted a hero with his tolerance as a " sport " 
away from the English tradition, it was only that we 
might see the tradition itself more clearly. Through sev- 
eral pretended heroines, representing social heterodoxy, 
she repeated a certain semi-Gallic type that enabled her 
to throw into contrast the beauty of the English ortho- 
dox life. Time and again she used the same set of pup- 
pets, and even the same scenery; she rarely omitted, for 
example, the fashionable London " salon," where calm 
tradition opposed tempestuous anarchy. 

Though no glimmer of humor ever showed in the writ- 
ings of Mrs. Humphry Ward, in the writer herself there 
must surely be something of the comic spirit. No woman 
who so deftly played upon the social aspirations of a 
great middle class and a great democracy can be thought 
capable of suppressing a secret smile. 

Nothing in science or the arts, of all that came down 
to us from the end of the Victorian age, was more amaz- 
ing than the fiction of Marie Corelli. That a vast army 
of readers looked to her novels for their entertainment 
and their opinions about society, it is useless to deny. 
The Eternal Mediocre is as potent as the Eternal Femi- 
nine. Marie Corelli was the genius of eternal mediocrity. 

What was Marie Corelli, if not a genius? 

She was reported the favorite novelist of Queen Vic- 



102 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

toria ; the multitude declared her a great writer ; the ordi- 
nary laws of life or logic or grammar were ignored by 
her; so she cannot have been anything other than a 
genius. It takes genius, surely, as the late Mr. Barnum 
remarked in other words, profitably to play the genius ; 
just as we lately concluded that Mrs. Ward must have 
had humor to play her little tractarian game with us. 

We may put ourselves on as arrogant a plane of analy- 
sis as we like, we must admit that there were periods when 
our literary circus would have become extremely tiresome 
if the performances of Marie Corelli had been taken out 
of it. She aired her notions — never by any chance any- 
thing resembling the truth — about society in England 
and Europe, as gaily as if she really knew about that 
society any more than she knew of syntax. The critics 
might sneer; still the countless army of the indiscrimi- 
nate read her with unabated and unashamed zeal, and 
had for retort against censure simply the assertion that 
the novels of Corelli were " perfectly elegant." 

The more calmly one considered the materials in which 
this writer worked, the more was one forced to confess 
that her skill in gauging the middle-class intellect was 
remarkable. She knew that they wanted the method of 
the most reckless journalism applied to fiction; she knew 
that there must be sensation, aristocratic atmosphere, and 
again sensation. You could observe Miss Corelli depict- 
ing impossible peers with one hand, as it were, and pre- 
tending an almost anarchistic scorn for all society with 
the other. Our chambermaids did not care whether peers 
were served to them with wine or with vinegar, so only 
they were served to them. Queen Victoria's favorite — if 
rumor wronged that august female in this regard one 
cannot too humbly apologise ! — knew perfectly that her 
vast audience of chambermaid intellects would read her 
lampooning of society with huge delight, because it has 
ever pleased the chambermaid mind to hear criticisms of 
that which fills it with envy. Once you have succeeded in 






WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 103 

appealing to the intellect of the chambermaid, you are 
sure of a champagne income. 

What did it matter if she wrote badly? To be able to 
write badly with such an impassioned air amounted to a 
distinction. She could write badly with more zest than 
any other person of her time. The very quantity of 
steam she had up, the tireless iteration of commonplace 
after commonplace, all uttered with the air of profound 
originality and the fire of invention, bred in the observer 
a sort of admiration. She puffed and blew, tattered and 
tore, so melodramatically, that the onlooker could hardly 
help being impressed — with appreciation of her energy, 
if with nothing else. She worked so hard to earn her 
money ! She did earn it, and what, you may ask, in view 
of that, did it matter that she was such a transparent 
humbug as an artist, that she knew nothing of logic, of 
decent composition, or of the probabilities? The fact 
that without any of the attributes of the artist she was 
able to impress a large proportion of the novel-readers 
of our time, is what gives her the right to be mentioned 
here. She typified the point that the Eternal Mediocre 
could reach, both in achievement and in acceptance. 

To consider the awful and endless score of her novels 
would serve simply as a sort of mental suicide. But one 
may cite an example or so, showing what sort of stuff 
it was that our readers patiently suffered because they 
thought they were being told the truth about European 
society. 

I recall, for instance, a novel called " Ziska " that was 
full of a lot of hocus-pocus about reincarnation, and 
swapping of souls ; it should be remembered for the rea- 
son that both Robert Hichens and E. F. Benson wrote on 
very similar matters, and if you wish to see the differ- 
ence between how to write and how not to write you 
have only to compare the Corelli novel with " Flames " 
or with " The Image in the Sand." In " Ziska," as in 
all the multitude of equally noisy novels from her pen, 



104 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Miss Corelli delighted in showing her contempt for that 
weird vision of her own that she labels English society. 
She called it a " giddy-pated, dancing, gabbling throng," 
and abounded in desperate adjectives, all calculated to 
tickle the chambermaids. The discriminating reader 
might laugh at Marie Corelli's satire — satire that had 
the keenness of the road-scraper — and might find her 
melodrama ridiculous ; that never disturbed her as long 
as the chambermaids continued to buy her books. She 
went on, year after year, using the worn-out " prop- 
erties " of sensationalism, and offending gaily against 
taste, logic and grammar. The chambermaids escaped 
unharmed from the awful mazes of her rhetoric, and her 
efforts to engraft " these kind " on the English language 
left them calm ; they had never used any other formula. 
Why, there was even one admirer so devout — Annie Mac- 
kay was her name, and Philadelphia saw her delivered of 
her book — as to collect together a number of " Beauties 
of Marie Corelli " and so rank her with de Rochefoucauld, 
and Chesterfield, and Oscar Wilde. In those " Beauties " 
there were many lovely fragments ; I must ask you to 
have patience, while we consider a few of them. 

A curious phenomenon was phrased thus : 

" I know I once had a few glimmerings of the swift 
lightning called genius in me, and that my thoughts were 
not precisely like those of everyday men and women." 

She herself, you see, admits it. If her thoughts had 
been like any other thoughts in the world, she could not 
have seen lightning glimmering. She herself called it 
genius. Others might call it simply maudlin metaphor. 
Again in another place she exclaimed: 

" Mon Dieu! if I had but the gift of writing I could 
conquer the world." 

Well, there was never any doubt as to the intention. 
It was ever a case of, as the Frenchman put it, " The 
ghost is willing, but ze meat is feeble." If the gift of 
writing, as she admits, was denied to her, why did she 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 105 

go on writing ? She was a genius ; you must not expect 
logic from a genius. She was also a philosopher. Ob- 
serve the originality, the pungency of some of her philos- 
ophies : 

" Methinks those who are best beloved of the gods are 
chosen first to die. ... In this world no one, how- 
ever harmless, is allowed to continue happy. 
The mind soon grows fatigued with pondering. It is 
better not to think. . . ." 

Far, far better. If, by avoiding thought, and logic, 
and grammar, you may become the literary goddess of 
the mentally unwashed, why attempt any of those things? 
Marie Corelli, every time she put pen to paper, violated 
all the laws of intelligence and language, and all truth 
and all probability, yet, in the affection of the Majority, 
she was cousin to the Isle of Man and sister to Hall 
Caine, as Mr. John Davidson's nun might have said in a 
ribald moment. The triteness of Martin Tupper dwin- 
dled before the balderdash of Marie Corelli, yet there 
were those who went to the trouble of selecting specimens, 
as if she had been a Voltaire or a Schopenhauer. 

There was no problem too grave that she would shrink 
from it. When such writers as Mrs. Humphry Ward 
and George Moore and John Oliver Hobbes and Richard 
Bagot were writing novels in which the Church of Rome 
played a leading part, Marie Corelli must do what she 
could to outshout them. She wrote " The Master Chris- 
tian." If it had not been by her, if it had not been 
written in Corelli but in English, it might have been 
something of an appeal to the judicious, something of a 
logical arraignment of the Romish Church. Instead it 
had the tone of the Hyde Park orator, the fire and fervor 
of the stump speech. It had also, exaggerated to the 
point of the ridiculous, the trick, so skilfully used by 
Mrs. Humphry Ward, of constantly parading before the 
reader important, powerful and aristocratic personages. 

Let us jot down some of the characters that filled the 



106 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

stage in this curious melodrama. There was the " Abbe 
Vergniaud" " a notable character of the time in Paris " ; 
Angela Sovrani was the " most exclusive lady in Europe " 
and " the painter of the finest picture ever seen since 
Raffaele and Michael Angelo " ; the Princess d'Agramont 
was " one of the best known society leaders in Europe " ; 
Sylvie Hermenstein was a " very well known personage 
in Europe," and Aubrey Leigh was " generally admitted 
to be something of a remarkable character in Europe." 
You see what an elegant company it was. If that aggre- 
gation of European celebrities was one to make the judi- 
cious smile, it was quite as surely one to appeal to the 
chambermaid intelligence that this author was determined 
to enthral. The people who read Marie Corelli at all 
swallowed her social display wholesale ; they never paused 
to note that in all this bombast there was neither discre- 
tion nor sense of proportion, and that even the style had 
heaped-up adjectives in it that loomed absurd and tauto- 
logical. 

It was when she pretended anger at the sins of society, 
when she took the attitude of Father Vaughan and Mrs. 
Ormiston Chant and Carrie Nation, that she was per- 
haps at her best, — which, if one keep art in mind at all 
— was her worst. Paris, the modern spirit, social France 
and Italy in general, the " haute mode " — whatever, in 
her fearsome foreign vocabulary, that may be! — how all 
these roused her to frenzied prose ! Paris is doomed. 
" Her men are dissolute, her laws are corrupt, her arts 
decadent, her religion dead. . . . Paris is hopelessly 
pagan ; nay, not even pagan, for the pagans had gods, 
and Paris has none." The most fashionable mode in 
France, England, Italy and Spain, according to the au- 
thor of " The Master Christian," was the philosophy of 
the Beast. She dismissed the theatre in a few pointed 
words: "What it is to be a manager! Do you know? 
It is to keep a harem like a grand Turk. . . ." Then 
there were the lilies of France, " emblems of honor, loy- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 107 

alty, truth and chivalry ! What smudged and trampled 
blossoms they seem to-day ! " 

And so on. Everything, you see, in the superlative 
degree. Everything noisy and loud and incoherent. 
Everybody was the most fashionable or the most notori- 
ous person in Europe ; everything was so superlative that 
nothing stood out in any relief. The author wrote, as 
some women talk, in a tremendously swift stream that 
means nothing at all. She tried in that particular story 
to vent a number of her pet aversions, such as the Church 
of Rome, the social conditions in France and Italy, and 
the tone of English society, but she spilled her spleen at 
such a childish rate that one could see nothing but a 
random spluttering; she impressed one, in this book as 
in all her others, in all her so-called pictures of English 
and international society, not with her arguments, but 
with the sight of herself in a temper. 

Hysterical indiscretions met one at every turn. In her 
fury at what she called Parisian decadence, she poked 
about among some of the writers in that clique, and men- 
tioned them as if she really knew them at first hand. She 
referred to " our hysterical little boy, Catallus Mendes," 
making one wonder if she had taken an oath to be inac- 
curate, even in names ; and she linked " Lord Byron, and 
Maeterlinck and Heinrich Heine " as " wicked persons." 

After that, need one mention that the limit of her 
French is the word " Tiens ! Tiens ! " incessantly re- 
peated? 

But what mattered these little departures from fact, 
and from coherence? Just as shrewdly as Mrs. Humphry 
Ward had she gauged our appetite ; her appeal to Amer- 
ican readers was nothing less than amusing. She might 
revile Paris ; she might declare both art and religion dead 
in Italy ; but she saw the dawning of " a new faith " in 
America. The faith she cared about was the American 
faith in Marie Corelli as a dispenser of information about 
society. 



108 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Had there been in our majority any sense of propor- 
tion, any glimmer of grammar, none of this melodramatic 
ranting, none of this exuberant nonsense, and none of this 
villainous English, could have drawn anything but ridi- 
cule. We know that the books sold, and that the ma- 
jority thought them " perfectly elegant," so that the only 
consolation the critic could win from the whole matter 
was to accept it, to accept even these boundlessly fool- 
ish novels of Marie Corelli as part of the history of the 
literary taste of the time. This was what the Eternal 
Feminine could accomplish when it set out to play fast 
and loose with facts, with logic and with grammar; here 
was the writing-woman reaching, finally, the very lowest 
depth of mediocrity ; here was what the novel had become 
in the age of the woman novelist's dominance ! 

" It is best," Marie Corelli remarked once, " to let eter- 
nal subjects like God and Shakespeare alone." 

The critic who would keep sweet his sense of humor and 
his optimism about literature, must amend that into 
" God and Shakespeare and Corelli," and trust that we 
have passed that point in the growth of taste when the 
chambermaid and her author can ever again dominate 
the scene. 

How completely the Corelli influence extended to 
America, was proved not only by the sale of her books 
here, but by the fact that, just as Henry James stimu- 
lated the literary activities of Edith Wharton, the au- 
thor of " The Master Christian " came to have American 
after-types. Before we look at the really valuable work 
done by women in the field of social fiction, I must ask 
you to glance at what was perhaps the most abortive 
effort ever made by an American in the domain of fiction 
about international society. In that domain we had the 
many fine achievements of Henry James ; but those ex- 
amples did not prevent an American woman from choos- 
ing the Corelli model. I remember nothing in the recent 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 109 

annals of American letters so melancholy as Lilian Bell's 
efforts to prove herself equal to the authoress in ordinary 
to the British chambermaid. 

Judged by her work, Lilian Bell came to the Corelli 
stage of her career logically; she was out of Chicago, by 
the Philadelphia Ladies' Home Journal. All who had 
watched her writing, through its phases of giving advice 
to bachelors, and hinting autobiographically at the inner 
lives of old maids, must have expected the psychologic 
Corellian moment in her sooner or later. In her very 
first novel she proved herself Marie Corelli's aptest pupil. 
Its name was " The Expatriates." As to its plot, and 
its international comparisons, those were entirely negli- 
gible ; we had had them all before from sources of more 
authority. What was noticeable in the book was the 
striking similarity in method and mushiness to the author 
of " The Master Christian." Here were the same mean- 
ingless superlatives, the same inability to put things into 
their proper scale, and the same overshooting all marks 
by way of gush and gabble. Here, too, was the same 
frothing at the wickedness of Paris. A novel offset to 
that was a seriously intended rhapsody over a somewhat 
smelly after-the-theatre resort in Chicago which, for want 
of a better place, long monopolized the patronage of 
the world and a half of that metropolis. Here, again, 
were showers of bad French; where Marie clung to 
" Tiens ! Tiens ! ! " Lilian depended mostly on " Mon 
Dieu ! " 

And here, finally, were the characters in " The Expa- 
triates " ; you may judge if they were not made wholly 
of Corelli cloth: 

Townshend — " One of the best whips in New York; and the 

best shot in Arizona." 
De Briancourt — " The most sought after man in all Paris." 
D'Auteuil — " With the most beautiful hands in Paris." 
Baronne Valencia — " Knew everybody all over the world who 

were worth knowing." 



110 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Mr. Hollenden — " Wealth estimated conservatively at sixty 
million of dollars." 

Will you cast that lot parallel with those wonderful 
people in " The Master Christian " : 

The Abbe Vergniaud — " A notable character of the time in 
Paris." 

Angela — " The most exclusive lady in Europe." 

Princess d'Agramont — " One of the best known society lead- 
ers in Europe." 

Sylvie — " A charming and very well known personage in 
Europe." 

Aubrey — " Something of a remarkable character in Europe." 

Just as Marie Corelli represented the lowest depth in 
literary art reached in England by a woman pretend- 
ing social portraiture in fiction, so Lilian Bell marked 
the most hopeless point touched by an American in the 
same province. If the Englishwoman's point of view and 
manner of expression were that of a garrulous chamber- 
maid, the American voiced the views and speech of those 
Cook's tourists who judge Paris from the information 
dispensed by megaphone on omnibuses. 

It seems, indeed, as one considers the case, as if in 
writing about society, English, American and interna- 
tional, the essentially feminine cast of mind made mostly 
for failure. Though the feminist intelligence could touch 
strange peaks on sex subjects, as we have seen by many 
examples, it rarely reached the proper pitch of reason 
and logic that produces social history. What success 
must needs be attributed to Mrs. Humphry Ward was 
due to a certain masculine quality in her. The ladies 
could spill passion recklessly enough; but when it came 
to the more serious matters, to the novel of manners, for 
instance, we had either the pure slop of Marie Corelli or 
the James-and-water of Edith Wharton. It was not until 
we reach the women who had masculine minds, that we 
find novelists who were valuable historians of society. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 111 

Of these I shall remind you of three: John Oliver 
Hobbes, Gertrude Atherton, and H. A. Mitchell Keays. 

To have written one fine book is more than falls to the 
lot of most. Fine, if not great, was at least one book by 
John Oliver Hobbes. When the writer who assumed that 
male signature died, there died one of the most talented 
Americans of our time. And just as Mrs. Craigie chose 
the veil of masculinity for her prose, so we came even- 
tually to admit the masculinity of her mind. As a social 
historian she ranked with the best of her time. If other 
women had shown how low the novelist of society could 
fall, Mrs. Craigie, in at least one book, proved what 
heights were possible. 

That book was " The School for Saints." 

It was the book of its year, as I pointed out at the 
time, to the very general astonishment of my entourage, 
and as I now see more clearly than ever. That year was 
a dozen years ago ; but the story has lost none of its 
charm. 

From astonishing us, in " Some Emotions and a 
Moral," and several other volumes with much be-commaed 
titles, by her brilliant dialogue and rapier-like thrusts 
through the surface of our Anglo-Saxon shams and so- 
ciety, John Oliver Hobbes reached, in " The School for 
Saints," a height that lifted her well into the front rank 
of those who were writing English fiction. Not Mere- 
dith had more sparkle, though vastly more cryptic. Her 
style held, in addition to the brilliant talk she had al- 
ways reproduced so deftly, the glow of romance and a 
philosophy that came near to true religiosity. The book 
had the fine flower of her talent ; she never went higher, 
neither in " Robert Orange " nor the following novels 
that were published before her death. 

To readers of the author's earlier books, " The School 
for Saints " exposed an unexpectedly commanding grip 
on serious things. The title stood for " that school for 



112 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

saints which has often been called the way of the world." 
The book was perhaps the finest achievement in that do- 
main of historical fiction which touched the struggle be- 
tween modern worldliness and the Catholic Church; not 
even the work of George Moore looms more memorable. 

The canvas on which the book was painted was large. 
History, treated in a charmingly personal manner, hung 
as a colorful background. Skilfully, picturesquely, and 
more accurately than any Miihlbach, Mrs. Craigie gave 
us delightful silhouettes of such personages as Disraeli, 
and General Prim. She interested us in Don Carlos, 
Duke of Madrid ; she gave us such fine glimpses of diplo- 
matic England in the days of the Irish Church bill as 
seemed almost too clever to be true. And all these fine 
people, all these fine things, she presented to us in such 
wise that — instead of laughing, as we had to do when a 
Corelli bombarded us with her assemblages of " persons 
famous throughout Europe " — we felt we were indeed 
moving among great personages, in great places, with a 
very brilliant gentlewoman as our guide. Observe the 
taste of fine analysis in her speech about Disraeli; a 
speech full of an irony anent the British character that 
only a woman with some touch of the foreign in her 
could have written — always excepting John Galsworthy, 
neither woman nor foreign, who was to come ten years 
later. This was the speech: 

" He won't be fully appreciated till every man jack of 
this generation is dead. He's too brilliant — he makes 
us all feel very dull dogs and very lame ducks. And 
he isn't an Anglo-Saxon — another crime. To be sure, we 
call him clever — infinitely clever; and we listen to his wit 
— as we watch a comedian — with amusement, which, how- 
ever, we should be sorry to derive from anyone who had 
better claims to our society." 

You have only to think of Primrose Day, and how little 
Disraeli is forgotten to-day, to know how truly Mrs. 
Craigie wrote. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 113 

In " The School for Saints " the author began the 
story of Robert Orange, a young man of the finest parts, 
destined for the English parliament ; a young man of 
intense emotions and a talent for adventure. The book 
told, chiefly, of his love for Brigit Parflete, who had been 
married, while scarce out of her convent, to a conscience- 
less courtier. The value of those pages, however, was 
hardly so much in the plot they carried, as in their re- 
production of the mental and religious tempers through 
which the personages, chiefly Robert, passed. It was one 
of those rare volumes that invited in even the most tired 
reader a desire for more of dissertation, less of action. 
Never, in this book, was John Oliver Hobbes dull. A 
fragment in the very first chapter telling of Robert's first 
visit to Miraflores remains one of the pleasantest prose 
idyls in our language. Solitary, as a short story, you 
could rank it with some of the pages of Theocritus. 
Rarely had the breaking of a young man's first enchant- 
ment been more artistically told. She had promised him 
a second interview. He finds her villa deserted. An old 
woman tells him she is gone. 

" Her life is just beginning — that is all. She went away 
laughing and singing. She's a great cocotte." 

"What is that?" asked Robert. 

" Mon Dieu ! " said the old woman. " Have you never met 
one ? " 

" Never/' said the boy. 

" They are very pretty, and they want money, and they 
tell lies. Why do you close your eyes, Monsieur?" 

" The glare is too strong," said Robert, " I must go home." 

It was Brigifs mother who so enchanted and disen- 
chanted Robert in early youth. Brigit herself grew up 
to many sorrows ; she was to learn that her father was 
an archduke whose marriage with her mother was only 
morganatic; she was to find her husband a purchasable 
cur ; and she was to take comfort only in her convent and 



114. THEIR DAY IN COURT 

in Robert's friendship. As for Robert, fortune took him 
through mental processes that left him Papist, though a 
member of parliament. He had adventures by fire and 
sword in Spain ; he lived much ; he had written books ; 
he had known many men and many lands ; he had been 
well beloved of at least two women ; and he emerged from 
all that varied early life to become a very earnest faith- 
ful powerful man. In the book called " Robert Orange " 
readers could follow his later career; but Mrs. Craigie 
never completely regained the compelling charm of " The 
School for Saints," not even in the latter half of it that 
she called by that other name. Still, to compare with 
" Evelyn Lines " and " Sister Teresa," the two John 
Oliver Hobbes books are well worth reading to-day. That 
quartet of books belongs definitely to the history of so- 
cial thought at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Fine sketches of character, and keen apothegms were 
everywhere in this book. There was Baron Zenill, shrewd 
financier and diplomat, easy still to parallel in the flesh, 
to whom " all Kings and Emperors, Powers and Domin- 
ions, were as persons in the great struggle between Jew 
and Gentile." There was Henry Berenville, who took to 
art, and painted people's voices. There was that de- 
lightful Lord Wight, who felt so keenly sad when Robert 
left him to propose to Brigit, that he maundered to his 
butler : 

" Poor young man ! . . . Young people like each 
other's society — especially of an opposite sex! . . . 
Eshelley ! " 

" Yes, my lord." 

" How all this reminds me of '29 and Lady Sybil. I 
suppose I was quite as agitated and — extraordinary on 
the night of the dinner at Madame de Lieven's?" 

" Every bit, my lord. Gentlemen are all the same, my 
lord. So are men. Will your lordship take both hot 
water bottles ? " 

" Both." 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 115 

Here were a couple of sharp sentences, delightful to 
compare to the balderdash so brazenly exploited as axio- 
matic by Marie Corelli: 

" The truest modesty is three parts pride." 

" I have wished that theatre-going were a moral obli- 
gation, for then we should have a highly critical audi- 
ence, and, as a consequence, good plays." 

There were occasional references to America : 

" This Old World is now mere literature — nothing else. 
It is the best of all possible libraries. But if you want 
drama — if you want to see the stuff that life and history 
are made of — you must cross the Atlantic." 

Again : 

" Cosmopolitanism is a beautiful word, if it be under- 
stood to mean liberty for all men; when, however, it 
means, as it seems to mean in the case of a great Re- 
public I could name, an indiscriminate hospitality, you 
will find that the host will wake one morning to find him- 
self shivering in nakedness on his own doorstep." 

A dozen years after that sentence was printed Henry 
James, returned after many years' absence, noted publicly 
in his book, " The American Scene," the fact that every- 
where in our land it was the alien who had a vigorous 
and triumphant air, the American who lacked it. 

I myself, I remember, met the same thought as the 
result of personal experience. I had been several days 
in the saddle; riding through the most civilised part of 
our Atlantic seaboard. Always, in approaching, in pass- 
ing through, and in leaving, town after town, village 
after village, it was the facial dominance of the alien that 
struck me; until I found myself wondering how many of 
these people, if I should have to ask them a question, 
would understand or speak a word of English ! 

Yes, it was a fine book, was " The School for Saints," 
and some of its wisdom — as in the case of that last 
quoted sentence — increases with the years. Nor is its 
charm yet faded. I recall still with delight that passage, 



116 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

toward the end of the book, wherein a dialogue takes 
place between an old nobleman and one who had asked 
whither Robert had taken his bride. Robert had re- 
turned to Miraflores with his bride ; it was the month of 
May when Robert first came there. At Miraflores the 
birds forever sang, the sun forever shone, the breeze was 
the perpetual honeyed breath of an eternal summer. At 
Miraflores there were no yesterdays and no to-morrows. 
From the sea sloped woods and winding alleys, flower- 
girt, to where white terraces told of the presence of the 
Villa Miraflores. Many years had passed between that 
month of May and Robert's return with his bride. Asked 
where they had gone our old nobleman answered: 

" To the Villa Miraflores." 

"Where is that?" 

" It is near an ancient fortress, on a great rock, on 
the northern coast of France." 

" Well," said the Dominican, " we have rocks and the 
sea here." 

" Oh, yes," answered Lord Wight, " we have rocks and 
the sea " 

" And the sky," added the priest, " and Almightv 
God." 

He looked up, as he spoke, to the heavens, where the 
sun was not silent. 

" True. But," said Lord Wight, looking with a sigh 
at the grim ruins of Slattrach, " we have not the Villa 
Miraflores." 

" Well," said the old priest serenely, " they are as 
happy as we are, mon fils. For there, too, at Miraflores, 
is Almighty God ! " 

What a relief, what a relief, to remember at last a 
book, written by a woman, that was at once fine art and 
fine entertainment ! " 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

If there was something masculine in the fiction of 
Mrs. Craigie, there was still more of it in that of Ger- 
trude Atherton. As an historian of American, Califor- 
nian and international society she deserves serious appre- 
ciation. Though she is become personally almost as 
expatriated as Mrs. Craigie or Henry James, the Ameri- 
canism in her subject matter assures her a place in any 
comparative record of our achievements. Despite much 
garrulity and excess in her work, betraying the writer's 
sex, the courage and forthright qualities in her proved 
that masculine side to her mind which made her a success 
as a social historian. How the lack of that masculine cast 
of thought made for failure has been shown in the cases 
of more than one woman novelist. 

When Ouida died, it occurred to me that she might 
have been the model on which, half consciously, half un- 
consciously following nature's lead, Gertrude Atherton 
patterned herself as a writer. Ouida's mind, too, was a 
man's rather than a woman's. Mrs. Atherton need not 
quarrel with the comparison, for if there was one quality 
more than another in Ouida which the intelligent must 
admit it is that she Could Write. Allow the " putting it 
on too thick " ; allow the many well-known " breaks " — 
the racing scene in " Under Two Flags," etc., etc., — al- 
low all that, all of which you will also find in the works 
of Mrs. Atherton, and still there stands out the great 
fact, the fact that distinguished her from ninety-nine 
of the so-called novelists of our day, that Ouida Knew 
How to Write. For years the opulence of her imagina- 
tion, the fecundity of her phrases, found massed against 
her that mightiest force in all England, namely, Eng- 
117 



118 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

land's stupidity. The same dull inertia of intellect, the 
same immobility of thought (misnamed by its protago- 
nists "conservatism"), that aroused Bernard Shaw to 
some of his keenest thrusts, barred the way to Ouida. 
The mob, it is true, carried away by the Oriental fer- 
vor in her earlier work, made her their idol; though not 
with any finer acumen than the critics who condemned her. 
Eventually even the critics came to see the value of her 
work. No writer in the last fifty years had been richer 
in the gifts that make the great storyteller. She had 
imagination and dramatic force enough to furnish a 
dozen of our " novelists of the day." Her wealth of 
phrase and invention was so great that she never would 
stop to revise. Corelli and Hall Caine together are not 
worth her worst pages. Had she cared to prune and 
snip, she might have equaled the reputations of Disraeli 
and Wilde for epigram. 

The same exuberance, the same masculinity of thought, 
marked Gertrude Atherton. Her career, however, was 
very different. Let us glance at that career. It has been 
of great interest throughout ; Mrs. Atherton has shown 
what could be done in writing historical American novels, 
novels tracing the varying stages of civilisation in old 
and new California, and novels of international marriage ; 
and she has, in short, done more than any other American 
woman to discover, in fiction, the manifold and often 
amazing qualities that go to make up our society in the 
making. It is only fair that we judge her, not by a 
single book, but by a consideration, however brief, of her 
gradual artistic progress. 

She herself, in late editions, divided her novels into 
those within the California Series, and those without. 
In actual numbers the books other than Californian are 
in the load ; in value to the historian of society the Cali- 
fornian books take precedence. At many points the books 
within and without the series touch ; if you think of the 
Californian books as simply descriptive of one province 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 119 

in American society, then you can think of "Patience 
Sparhawk " as covering New York, and of " Senator 
North " as giving us Washington, while in " The Arisr 
tocrats " there was quite as keen social comparison as in 
" American Wives and English Husbands " which latter 
is placed in the Californian Series. 

Her early indiscretions, however, Mrs. Atherton no 
longer admits very loudly. Yet they remain part of her 
artistic baggage, and without them she might never have 
been heard of. That, too, is part of American literary 
history, that with such books as " Hermia Suydam " and 
" What Dreams May Come," calculated — coldly and de- 
liberately calculated to shock, a writer like Gertrude 
Atherton should make her first appeals to the public. 
She knew her public. At the end of the 'Eighties it still 
refused to be stirred by anything but the sensational, 
and the more sexual the sensation the better. For litera- 
ture it had apparently lost whatever taste the periods of 
Poe, and Washington Irving, and Hawthorne, should 
have bred; for the prosperity period of the 20th cen- 
tury, the period of ruinous competition between " best 
sellers " boomed as industriously as breakfast-foods, — 
for all these we were not yet ready. So Mrs. Atherton 
wrote her unpleasant brace of novels ; she made her sen- 
sational little stir; she was launched. Futile, now, to 
attempt accurate division of the blame ; the public taste 
of the time must share it with the shrewd unscrupulous- 
ness of an author determined to succeed. Shrewdness, too, 
was in her not properly signing those early stories ; she 
is able, to-day, to ignore them when in her newest book 
she lists those " by the same author." 

Although years afterward she printed a story that is 
given chronologic precedence in her Californian Series, 
it was not until " The Doomswoman " appeared that 
Gertrude Atherton had artistically to be reckoned with. 
Here, for the first time, the critic could seriously con- 
sider her. Here, for the first time, she showed, quite 



120 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

aside from her picturesque and valuable reproduction 
of early Californian life, that courage about the rela- 
tions between man and woman in our world which was 
afterwards to distinguish all of her work. Here first she 
proved the broad outlook that led one to apply the term 
masculine to her cast of thought. She voiced here the 
realisation that woman is monogamous, man polygamous ; 
she painted man as a creature of complex desires, in whom 
the animal and divine so strangely mingle that he can 
love one woman to the death, while allowing his lighter 
affections to play with others. When " The Dooms- 
woman " appeared, in 1893, I ventured the opinion that 
in her work would surely be found some of the best fic- 
tion to be written by American women in the next quar- 
ter of a century. To-day, fifteen years later, that proph- 
esy is by no means matter for regret. 

Aside from those pages in " The Doomswoman " which 
foreshadowed the future painter of large canvases in a 
manner truly large, one closed the book with a sense of 
having been in a land of delightful languor, of velvet 
and lace, of honeyed words and sudden flashes of passion, 
of heels clicking to the rhythm of El Son, and of music 
playing love songs. The air was full of laughter and 
songs, festivities and flirting; handsome men in jackets 
bespangled with diamonds, and wearing sombreros be- 
decked with plumes ; beautiful girls with the gold of 
California boiling in their veins and the long lashes of 
Spain shading their languorous eyes — all these joined in 
a very vivid picture of life in Early California. It may 
not have been historic; but it was a very interesting ef- 
fort to make history charming, an effort that Mrs. 
Atherton was later to repeat in the case of Alexander 
Hamilton. In the background of that romantic picture 
of the still somewhat Spanish California of " The Dooms- 
woman " we saw the coming of American materialism. 
Out of the contrasts between the Californian character 
— compound of Spanish romance and American practi- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 121 

cality — and the character of European civilisations, Mrs. 
Atherton was afterwards to glean her strongest stories. 
The gulf between the themes of " The Doomswoman " 
and of " Ancestors " is not so vast ; it is the increase in 
the artist's skill and power that is most noticeable. What- 
ever excursions she made into other fields, it was to Cali- 
fornia — California in its provincial and its international 
relations to Anglo-Saxon society — that her art, at its 
happiest, turned. 

One of her excursions away from California was called 
" Patience Sparhawk and Her Times." This was a very 
vivid, unflattering picture of society in New York. It 
was a large canvas, the colors laid on boldly. Always, 
indeed, after her first tentative essays in fiction, this 
author worked with a sweeping brush upon a goodly 
canvas ; she risked all the dangers that come from ex- 
uberance and carelessness ; only by the real value of her 
matter and the impression of courageous and original 
thinking did her books survive their obvious defects. 
" Patience Sparhawk," in spite of many such obvious de- 
fects, remained a noteworthy novel, and marked a con- 
siderable artistic advance over " Hermia Suydam," the 
heroine of which had not very dissimilar problems. No 
more adequate exposition of the different ferments and 
forces in our Eastern civilisation had been made than 
" Patience Sparhawk." Its problem concerned the evolu- 
tions of a soul free from dogma, a soul upon whom the 
incidents and accidents possible in this high-keyed age 
had varying and always interesting effects. 

The author's clarity of vision, and boldness of ex- 
pression showed in the opinions she here gave of society 
in New York, — opinions that she was later, in " The 
Aristocrats " and other books, to amplify and repeat. 
There were caustic pages explaining, without reserve, just 
what was necessary, in point of turpitude, to become a 
modern queen of opera-bouff e ; and there were humorous 



122 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

pages referring to the dear dames of the W. C. T. U., 
in Yonkers and other Westchester County preserves, who 
guard so busily our American morals. The " swagger 
New York type " of girls was described as " the marble 
statue with the snub nose " ; New York men were said 
to " admire God because he made himself of their gen- 
der," and our society girls were finally summed up in a 
passage noting " their tiny waists and hips, their narrow 
chests and modest busts . . . their polished skin 
and brilliant shallow eyes, their elegant sexless forms, 
their haughty pose and supercilious air. . . ." From 
even such brief excerpts you may note some of this writ- 
er's virtues and vices ; she always had the courage of her 
opinions, and to voice them she cared little for smooth- 
ness, or feared tautology. In an age of literary com- 
promise, it was for the courage of her opinions that we 
forgave her much. In this book she was bold enough to 
assert that most husbands in our American upper 10,000 
are unfaithful to their wives, and that most wives in that 
same sphere dispel ennui by taking lovers ; and she 
chanced the displeasure of that dangerous tyranny, the 
press, by stating that " the under-bred newspaper man 
touches a lower notch of vulgarity than any person of 
similar social degree the world over." 

The general tone of finding fault with New York so- 
ciety that marked " Patience Sparhawk " was later the 
central theme of " The Aristocrats," which Mrs. Atherton 
published anonymously, but later acknowledged. Artis- 
tically she need never have been ashamed of it. The 
salutary, ironical truth about the would-be aristocratic 
trend in America had never been better told. 

Our aristocratic ambitions and uneasy strivings were 
made the keenest fun of; there were several definite cari- 
catures of known individuals ; and the heroine, Lady 
Helen, English and titled, who voiced all these observa- 
tions upon our body social, was nothing less than delight- 
ful. Our mysterious social distinctions bewildered her so 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 123 

utterly; she was so eager to discover who really prac- 
tised the fine American theory that all are free and equal. 
She found the sales-lady looking down on the hired help, 
and " the very best sets " looking down on everyone else. 
She found an intellectual set, which tried to give the 
aristocratic note to all art and all life, and which was 
" endeavoring to create a rarefied atmosphere which only 
the elect can enter, where those that do enter prove 
themselves to be of the elect." In that set were all " the 
successful brains of New York " and Lady Helen 's pic- 
ture of those brilliant men and women was worth any 
reader's while. Their aristocracy overwhelmed her; she 
could not understand it ; she had been so used to taking 
certain things for granted. Only rarely did she meet a 
sensible person, who admitted these follies, and added: 
" When we've got twenty generations to the good we'll 
be just as unconscious about it as you are. But aris- 
tocracy will be a sort of itch with us till then. Quanti- 
ties of idiots have their family trees framed." 

Finally, it was in this book that Mrs. Atherton paid 
American literature that compliment which has ever re- 
mained memorable. It was at the period, you must re- 
member, when the influence of the matinee girl and of 
Mellin's Food was uppermost. The speech was put into 
the mouth of a certain popular and successful author, 
one of the intellectual aristocrats at whom the whole 
satire was aimed: 

" You think I'm an ass," he said, " and I am. I have 
to be. I nearly starved, trying to be a man, so I be- 
came an emasculated backboneless poseur to please the 
passionless women and the timid publishers of the United 
States. To please the sort of American woman who makes 
the success of a novelist — the faddist and the gusher — 
you must tickle her with the idea that she is a superior 
being because she has no passion, and that you are 
creating a literature which only she can appreciate — she 
with a refinement and a bleached and laundried set of 



124 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

tastes which have made her a tyrannical middle-class 
enthusiast for all that is unreal and petty in art ! . . . 
I wish I had been born an Englishman. To be great in 
English literature, you've only to be dull; but to be 
great in American literature you've got to be a eunuch." 
Strong language was ever one of Mrs. Atherton's pos- 
sessions. Not stronger, however, were those words than 
the case called for. Only one thing, however, she omitted 
to point out — the theme of many of my preceding chap- 
ters — namely, that to the woman novelist was permitted 
such license as few male writers cared to take. 

From American society to the American Senate Mrs. 
Atherton crossed easily ; in " Senator North " she proved 
that she could write an historical novel that, whether ac- 
curate or not, was certainly good reading. 

The whole pattern of fashionable as well as political 
life in Washington was here carefully traced. She gave 
us social and official life in the capital, at the time of our 
war with Spain ; she made the actual personages of that 
day romantic under but thin disguises. The sanity of 
her point of view was more inexorable than ever before ; 
by its light she reviewed for us the good and the bad in 
that curious vortex of aristocracy and bureaucracy. The 
sketches of old Washingtonians, of the set that knew 
nothing of men in public life, and did not want to know 
them ; the pen-portraits of various easily recognised sena- 
tors and cabinet ministers ; all were unfailingly inter- 
esting. 

As little as in " Patience Sparhawk " she spared New 
York did she now spare Washington ; but she had gained 
in skill. She now gave both sides of her pictures. 
Though she painted the New England politicians, the 
Westerners, and their wives and daughters, sharply 
enough; she also gave us the spectacle of the heroine at- 
tempting to refute the notion, held by the Old Washing- 
tonians — the " cave dwellers " — that twangs and tooth- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 125 

picks and Uncle Sam beards constituted the main features 
of all American statesmen. Though she omitted no ac- 
cusation that the worst enemy of American government 
ever made against that system and its members, yet the 
book was, in the main, an effort to prove that the af- 
fairs of our nation are honestly conducted, just as Paul 
Leicester Ford had once attempted a similar task, in 
"Peter Stirling." 

What was for long this writer's ruling passion still 
dominated the central theme of " Senator North " ; but 
at this remove of time it is only the pictures of Washing- 
ton's social and political life that remain valuable. That 
ruling passion was the depiction, in many and varied 
situations, of the American woman whose brilliant mind 
succeeds in conquering her passions. In her most mature 
books Mrs. Atherton merged that problem deftly into 
the larger ones of international social import which she 
undertook to handle; but it was never possible for her, 
in this detail, entirely to divorce the artist from the 
human being. The very nature of her art was too per- 
sonal and unrestrained for that. 

The vigorous infusion of her personality and her 
prejudice was what lent the primal charm to her histori- 
cal novel about Alexander Hamilton. Whether that 
charm is now somewhat faded, whether we now realise 
that she may have helped Hamilton's fame as little by 
her passionate espousals as his detractors had before that 
harmed it — is another matter. What is quite sure is that 
it was very vigorous and effective special pleading, and 
that considered sheerly as an historical novel it came as 
a relief in a time when a very plague of inartistic and 
tedious novels misnamed historical was upon us. 

For months, when our century was still an infant, the 
puerilities, the incorrigible falsehoods, and the slovenly 
methods of our " historical novels," had been dismaying 
the judicious. In " The Conqueror," at last, we had an 



126 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

historic romance to the making of which had gone a 
genius of enthusiasm and imagination and prejudice. 
Certain pages in American history were here most ro- 
mantically recreated. Just as in " Senator North " the 
social and diplomatic society of the national capital was 
shown as we know it to-day ; so in " The Conqueror " 
we breathed the atmosphere of a hundred years ago. 

If Hamilton, as a historic figure, had hitherto been 
neglected, Mrs. Atherton did her best to atone for that. 
Her passionate, romantic plea made him rank well up 
among the dominant figures of history or fiction. As a 
portrait we cannot now vouch for its accuracy; but as a 
picture — as a work of art, as a canvas by a Sargent 
seeing in his sitter qualities the mirror never showed — it 
deserves to rank with the best prose portraits of our 
time. As keenly as her prejudices permitted Mrs. Ather- 
ton had indulged in research among private and tamily 
papers ; she had visited the West Indies and steeped her- 
self in the scenes of Hamilton's youth ; she had left nothing 
undone to impress her hero's romantic and intellectual 
stature upon the public. She succeeded indubitably in 
this, that as we read her book, the charm of it, and the 
passion of her pleading, fascinated us and persuaded us. 

After having given us this romantic impression of 
Hamilton in 500 pages, Mrs. Atherton's steam was not, 
at that time, exhausted; she promised to follow this ro- 
mance with a strict biography. That promise has not, 
so far, been kept ; the enterprise, whether resulting in 
any definite increase of our historical knowledge or not, 
would have been interesting ; our most attractive histori- 
cal documents have ever been achieved by the aid of a 
fine healthy prejudice. 

To all of Mrs. Atherton's human and artistic prejudices 
the character of Alexander Hamilton appealed irresistibly ; 
the eminence in him of a cold-blooded intellect corre- 
sponded to that in her which, as already noted, was 
inseparably a part of her own equipment. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 127 

Colored by romantic prejudices though it was, this 
book held a picture of the formative period of our United 
States which must have appealed forcibly to the intel- 
ligence and taste of our better people. It was an argu- 
ment calculated to awake much dormant aristocracy in 
us. If in " The Aristocrats " Mrs. Atherton vigorously 
flayed what was ridiculous and abortive in some of our 
Eastern efforts at social aristocracy, in " The Conqueror " 
she did something more than justice to the man who 
seemed to her the first real gentleman of America. If 
we are indeed far gone on the leveling, lowering way of 
that democracy which Hamilton himself so dreaded, we 
yet could not refuse appreciation to this picturesque por- 
trait of a triumphant individualist. 

Nothing that Gertrude Atherton ever did so com- 
mended her to the gratitude of what aristocracy may 
really exist in us as this book. The word aristocratic is 
to be used in full sense of its apparent danger; no other 
is possible. Hamilton was essentially aristocratic; the 
more the majority in America has moved from the an- 
cient aristocratic ideals, the more keenly have those ideals 
impressed themselves upon the inevitable minority. In 
this book we had the intellectual splendors of a noble 
gentleman and a great statesman presented to us. We 
were asked to realise the dominant part played by Ham- 
ilton in the framing of these States, and in steering them 
through their first dangers ; to value the prophetic wis- 
dom of his measures ; to admit him the first of the 
Imperialists, the leader of the legal profession and the 
greatest pamphleteer of his time. We were to believe 
him, while still a boy in years, intellectually overshadowing 
the entire country. 

The book had, of course — quite aside from the detail 
of style, which must be touched later, in a more general 
view — its obvious defects. If in the early chapters, de- 
picting Hamilton's youth, Mrs. Atherton had so deeply 
steeped herself in the West Indian atmosphere as to 



128 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

prove herself a truly romantic novelist, in those later 
passages, where our personages moved amid scenes and 
actions for which history had long been witness, the 
author's powers flag; she was hampered by the hard 
facts, and her invention no longer responded even to the 
spur of prejudice. 

At various intervals in her literary career Gertrude 
Atherton indulged in letters to the newspapers. Whether 
this was simply to expose her very vigorous prejudices 
to an audience that books did not appeal to ; or was part 
of a shrewd campaign to keep herself in the public 
limelight at all hazards, would be hard to ascertain. 
Either, or both, of those reasons would be in keeping 
with her artistic character. She printed her slight opinion 
of American men broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, 
and thereby stirred up an entertaining controversy. The 
decade that has elapsed since then has not disproven her 
case; you have only to consider the score of international 
marriages made by American women to realise that 
against the essence of aristocratic civilisation the Euro- 
pean stands for our American men have nothing adequate 
to offer. Mrs. Atherton praised the British male, and 
she declared there wasn't an aristocratic nose in all New 
York. When she was not stirring up our animals with 
unpleasant comparisons like that, she was sailing head 
on into our literary conditions. In judiciously fanning 
newspaper controversy we have rarely had an author 
more successful than this one. 

That her opinions on American women and English 
men deserve attention, however, for other than adver- 
tising purposes, we were eventually to have a number of 
serious and considerable novels as proof. In several large 
and almost epic canvases she proved herself one of our 
most thorough social historians. 

With the growing ease and habit of intercourse between 
the social elements of America and England, the conse- 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 129 

quent problems were yearly increasing in fascination for 
our writers on contemporary manners. Since Henry 
James, in the days of his youth, first began juggling this 
question of international marriage in his highly finished 
style, many novelists and essayists, on both sides of the 
Atlantic, had attacked the subject. Our newspapers 
shouted themselves hoarse on the same text; and when 
one of our daughters married a foreigner we had veritable 
swamps of descriptive gossip confronting us. The mar- 
riages might turn out badly ; we might sermonise solemnly ; 
the fact remained that they increased in number and 
conspicuousness. 

Always excepting Mr. James, the literature of inter- 
national marriage has nothing to show that goes more 
keenly to the roots of the matter than did the Atherton 
novels. She did not reach that point without steps aside, 
however. Novelettes called " The Traveling Thirds," 
" The Gorgeous Isle," and " His Fortunate Grace," were 
simply arrant and obvious potboiling. The last, for in- 
stance, was the story of a British nobleman and a Van- 
derbilt interwoven with any number of absurd and taste- 
less fancies. The contempt and oblivion into which that 
story fell must have had their warning to that side of Mrs. 
Atherton which failed to take seriously the responsibility 
of the artist. At any rate it was not long before she 
began a series of stories which proved that she could 
probe deep, and that she could fashion in prose strikingly 
thorough reviews of the temperamental differences be- 
tween the two most frequently intermarrying Anglo- 
Saxon races. 

In her assumption of titles, however, she occasionally 
assumed too much, as when in " American Wives and 
English Husbands " she posed as national certain types 
and characteristics that were only Californian. The hero- 
ine of that book was so thoroughly a Californian aristo- 
crat, that to confound her with her equals of New York 
or her inferiors of Chicago would be alike impossible and 



130 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

unjust. Not even Mrs. Atherton is equal to framing in 
prose the type, either male or female, that all of us 
would allow as national; nowhere on our continent has 
such a type yet come into being; we are Southern, or 
New England, or Middle Western, or Californian, or 
merely mongrels between Manhattan and Anglomaniac ; 
but it will be many years before anything remotely re- 
sembling an American average is bred either in the actual 
or in literature. When Henry James offered " Daisy 
Miller " there began a chorus, denying her Americanisms, 
which is not yet still ; yet he caught and held truer vision 
of the American girl than may be found anywhere else in 
letters, and the years have only confirmed the accuracy of 
his art. 

In her depiction of the Californian character Mrs. 
Atherton had both skill and authority. Her knowledge 
of that country's early history, and of the birth and 
breeding and manner of thought of its natives, served 
her to good purpose in several sketches of beautiful, high- 
souled and brilliant young women whose marriages to 
Englishmen formed, in either the fact or the prospect, 
the main themes of such books as " The Californians," 
" American Wives and English Husbands " and " An- 
cestors." Her expositions of the difference between the 
massive conservatism, the solid depth of the Briton, and 
the quick nervousness of the Californians, were invariably 
interesting. What she set down dogmatically in one 
book, she occasionally refuted in the next ; her sex still 
betrayed itself now and then. In one book she asserted 
the impossibility of moulding the British male away from 
the form the centuries had given him ; she made one of 
her characters aver that: 

" An Englishman is certain of several things if he 
marries a perfectly normal Englishwoman of his own 
class. She will obey him, she will have as many children 
as he wishes, her scheme of life will be his, and no mat- 
ter how bright she may be, she will adapt herself to him 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 131 

— which is not the least important point. An English- 
man simply cannot adapt himself to anybody. It isn't 
in him. He can be a good husband on his own lines, par- 
ticularly if he loves his wife ; and if he loves her enough 
and she makes herself more charming than other women, 
he'll be faithful to her and make her happy. But she 
must adapt herself to him." 

Yet within ten years after that was written, Mrs. Ath- 
erton printed " Ancestors," which undertook to prove 
that it was not impossible for an Englishman to adapt 
himself. 

Inasmuch as " Ancestors " is so far the largest work 
Mrs. Atherton has attempted, and typifies the most char- 
acteristic of her virtues and her defects as a novelist, 
it is to be considered at somewhat greater length here. 
There, more than ever, the author adopted the large and 
epic manner that included all lest anything be omitted. 
She made things as difficult for the reader as possible; 
the mere size of the book was affrighting, and the can- 
vas teemed bewilderingly with a multitude of people. But 
the clarity of the author's intelligence won through, and 
the power of the book eventually became its paramount 
quality. 

Again we were made to feel keenly the high plane that 
social civilisation in England has reached, and again 
that high level is contrasted against the charms and the 
perils of our younger culture. Our author plunged a 
young English aristocrat from one of the most brilliant 
places in European statesmanship into the forefront of 
public life in California. From the certainties of his po- 
sition in England he migrated to the uncertainties of 
California, to the hope of helping to cleanse the Augean 
stables of our politics, and to the tremendous task of re- 
building the San Francisco that fire and earthquake had 
felled. We saw him listening to the advice of a fair 
cousin, and to the pull of some far-away ancestral ties, 
and becoming a very fair sort of Californian, making up 



132 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

his mind to try for something better than what had been 
his in England, namely, the winning his way in American 
public life through sheer force of individual character and 
brain without help of all that accumulation of family 
tradition that had helped him to his old eminence. We 
were again shown California and the Californians in a 
hundred varying moods ; all those favorite topics the 
author enlarged; if we have not a vivid notion of the 
differing elements that went to the making of San Fran- 
cisco society at the beginning of this century, it is not the 
fault of " Ancestors." 

As in all of this author's other books the love-story 
was but incidental to the larger colors that are on the 
canvas, the colors of social contrasts, of temperamental 
differences, and finally of the magnificent and awful spec- 
tacle of San Francisco's decline and fall. Her heroine was 
again a rare combination of charm and reason, blood and 
brain, for which she could thank ancestors who were 
Spanish and Southern and Saxon, Caballeros and Argo- 
nauts. Vivid pictures of the social conglomerates in San 
Francisco society mingled with sketches of its reckless 
epicureanism. 

In the final summing up " Ancestors " was an epic of 
San Francisco. 

San Francisco first appeared in literature in an epi- 
gram of Oscar Wilde's. Its apotheosis is in " Ances- 
tors." Here was painted all the brilliance of thought and 
word and deed that distinguished artistic San Francisco ; 
all the electricity that made the town the home of the 
most promising and the most hopeless talents on our con- 
tinent is in this book; and its human history before the 
earthquake will scarcely be better written. If the earth- 
quake and the fire destroyed much that was memorable, 
they also gave us this book. Fashionable life, bohemian 
life, all-night life, were all sketched in a set of colorful 
pictures that deserve historic value. Unless you lived in 
San Francisco yourself, in that period, " Ancestors " 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 133 

must hold your most vivid picture of it. The old-time 
glories are made brilliant, so that the contrast to the 
later ruins is all the sharper. Watching those ruins, 
one of the book's characters, who had ever enjoyed his 
San Francisco to the full, drank this toast to it, as it 
confronted him like a river of fire : 

" Here's to Zinkand's, Tait's, the Palace Grill ! The 
Poodle Dog ! Marchand's ! The Pup ! Delmonico's ! 
Coppa's! The Fashion! The Hotel de France! And 
here's to the Cocktail Route, the Tenderloin, and the 

Bohemian Club ! And here's " By this time his voice 

was dissolving, and the glass was describing eccentric 
curves. " Here's to the old city, whose like will never be 
seen this side of hell again. Pretty good imitation of 
heaven, in spots, and everything you chose to look for, 
anyway. And the prettiest women, the best fellows, the 
greatest all-night life, the finest cooking, the wickedest 
climate. Here's to San Francisco — and damn the 
bounder that calls her 'Frisco ! " 

Mrs. Atherton did not omit, in this novel, to aim ar- 
rows at some of her pet targets. We have seen, already, 
how in " The Aristocrats " and elsewhere she paid her 
respects to the conditions of literary success in America ; 
now she returned to the matter in a paragraph that first 
touched those fashionable women in our modern society to 
whom passion is the only law: 

" Those women don't repent, for they never admit that 
the laws of common mortals apply to them. . . . To 
mull themselves, commit some flagrant error that lands 
them in the divorce court, or high and dry in the out- 
skirts — that is another matter. They repent then, sans 
doute; and get no mercy. We overlook everything at 
this apex of civilisation but stupidity. We respect the 
high-handed but not the light-headed. That is one rea- 
son those longwinded novels of sin and repentance — 
generally over one slip and when the man has wearied — 
leave us cold. We know too much. It seems such a lot 



134 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of fuss about so little. If some of these good, painstaking 
and — let us whisper it — bourgeosie novelists had seen 
one-tenth of the pagan disregard for all they cherish most 
highly, that I have seen, and if they only could be made 
to comprehend — which they never could — how absolutely 
admirable these same women are in many other respects 
— such capacity for deep undying friendship, such un- 
calculating loyalty, such racial possibilities of heroism 
— well, they would do a good deal harder thinking than 
they have had to do yet, if they attempted to readjust 
their traditions to the actual facts of life." 

There were many pages in " Ancestors " that no Amer- 
ican could read without equal glow of shame and pride. 
One of the country's firmest optimists was made to say 
that " the country's politics are the worst part of it, 
because circumstances have forced them into the hands of 
a class of men that make their living out of them, and 
whose natural destiny was pocketpicking and the Rogues' 
Gallery," yet to conclude that " the great statesman of 
the future is going to be the lawyer that checks the 
power of the unscrupulous capital, without at the same 
time delivering the country over to the mercies of that 
equally unscrupulous tyranny, the labor union." 

To quote from Gertrude Atherton is a gentle way of 
approaching the obvious defects in her writing. Not one 
of the quotations I have made — though I made them 
without that intention — will stand careful analysis as 
specimens of good English. Matter has ever been this 
author's concern, not manner; her successes have been by 
virtue of a sort of brutal strength, a blind and garrulous 
forging ahead toward an aim, something akin to those 
British warriors whom an historic phrase depicts as 
" muddling through somehow." Mrs. Atherton always 
muddled through somehow ; but she never more thoroughly 
muddled her readers than in some of the pages of " An- 
cestors." It was proof that, however she had broadened in 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 135 

her grasp of life, as an artist in English she had advanced 
no whit since she wrote " The Doomswoman." " Ances- 
tors " was a book of 700 pages ; if two-sevenths in that 
mass of words had been elided the story had been the 
better for it; and that applies to almost all of her later 
novels. 

Her style, at its best, has the virtue of driving straight 
ahead; if elegance is not attempted, simplicity at least 
is there. But in the opening of " Ancestors " she was 
taken with a most amazing fit of stammering. It was as 
if she had suddenly adopted a farrago of Meredith, James 
and the Dear Lord Knows Who. This was what she 
wrote : 

" When she had accepted the invitation of one of the 
old castle playmates to visit her in Florence, it had been 
with a lively anticipation that made dismay the more 
poignant in the face of hypochondria." 

It took several pages of stuff like that before she 
found her own fairly lucid, graphic gait. It was ex- 
actly as if, being out of practice, her hand had suddenly 
lost its cunning. Yet, towards the close of " Ancestors," 
or at least after 487 pages, she could again write: 
" Her eyes were very bright, and her cheeks deeply 
flushed, but were the cause a fully satisfied ambition, he 
could only guess," an awkwardness of style from which 
our author is evidently never to be divorced. Carelessness 
of English is not her only vice; she is often careless of 
her facts, so that her Munich references in " Ancestors " 
are more impressionistic than accurate. She did not, in 
the same book, trouble to have " dienstmann " and 
" Boerse " spelled correctly, and she adhered to the fallacy 
of spelling (p. 385) a grill in a wall as if it had other 
origin than the grill we cook over. 

On page 369 of " The Conqueror " we found this : 

Jefferson, in the Cabinet, protested with such solemn per- 
sistence against so dangerous a precedent, namely the stamp- 



136 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ing of the head of President Washington on the coins of the 
newly established mint, and Hamilton perforated him with 
such arrows of ridicule, that Washington exploded with 
wrath and demanded to know if neither never intended to 
yield a point to the other. 

It would be hard to find anything more awkward than 
the last clause in the pages of any writer pretending to 
the first class. Again, in the same book, singular and 
plural were wonderfully mixed, as my italics in the fol- 
lowing quotation, from page 166, show: 

Washington gave battle to the British at Brandwine, was 
defeated, and in the following month surprised it at German- 
town, and was defeated again. Nevertheless, he had aston- 
ished the enemy with his strength and courage so soon after 
a disastrous battle. To hold Philadelphia was impossible, 
however, and the British established themselves in the Capital 
of the colonies, making, as usual, no attempt to follow up 
their victories. 

In a writer who could make one forget such crudities 
of style and manner as Gertrude Atherton's books are 
full of, there must indeed be much other virtue. Of what 
her virtue as a social historian in fiction consisted I have 
done my best to remind you. 

In the work of H. A. Mitchell Keays the masculine 
breadth of view was so dominant that at least one critic 
held it to be by a man. When the author's femininity 
was discovered, it was easy enough to find touches that 
only a woman's heart and knowledge could have dictated ; 
yet the masculinity of outlook remained, and one could 
deliberately give this writer the palm for having most 
boldly expressed the bravest view of certain basic features 
of our body social that have ever been put in form of the 
novel. 

" The Road to Damascus " was never, I believe, a " best 
seller." I doubt if those who gauge literary success by 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 137 

the bargain counters in the dry-goods stores ever heard 
of the book. Yet I have no hesitation in calling it the 
finest novel of social import written by an American 
woman in recent times. I use the phrase " social " now 
in the larger sense of human society, not of this or that 
province of fashionable manners. 

This was one of those rare books proving that all is 
not hopelessly chaff in the field of American fiction. Even 
Gertrude Atherton has become so much an expatriate, 
and her work so much concerned itself with international 
comparisons, that she could never be classed as an Amer- 
ican writing about Americans. " The Road to Damas- 
cus " was the one book that, coming into that classifia- 
cation, redeemed the melancholy average. 

Despondent enough one had grown in contemplation 
of that average. One fell time and again into the notion 
that only from abroad would ever come the occasional ar- 
tistic achievement; always, just as one was at the last 
gasp of optimism, something turned up. Were one not 
eternally counting on that inevitable turn of the tide ; 
were not judgment — foolishly misnamed pessimism — con- 
stantly ripe for sentencing so that one's store of spon- 
taneous enthusiasm be not used up too easily — do you 
suppose one could have continued so long spying out the 
land for our reading public? A confirmed pessimist has 
no business in the critical office, no more than has a con- 
firmed optimist. The former so wastes his censure that 
when a really supreme call comes for it he has nothing 
out of the usual to offer; the latter makes eulogy so 
cheap that when honest need for it arrives his praise 
sounds no louder than when, as is his constant habit, 
he is merely echoing the advertising phrases of the pub- 
lisher. 

Here, then, was an oasis in the dry desert of Ameri- 
can fiction. A book that furnished refreshment more last- 
ing than the reading of new novels usually gives. Of this 
sort of pleasure there are many varieties. One may 



138 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

come upon a new turn of plot; one may find a bold, or a 
precious turn of style; or one may come upon a new 
character. In all these discoveries there is charm ; but the 
keenest comes, perhaps, at finding an addition to the gal- 
lery of pleasant portraits one has in one's library. No 
matter how large one's reading, that gallery of favorites 
is never too large. 

It has not been given to all authors to leave behind 
them heirs to dwell in posterity's memory. This author 
has left a style; that one is recalled as the pioneer of 
an 'ism ; another is remembered for the accuracy of his 
or her parochial details ; another for a fecundity of in- 
vention. But those who have left us memorable characters 
are the fewest of all. Time, too, weeds ruthlessly in this 
field. Are there not already those who declare Henry 
Esmond a bore, and that there are distinct odors of old 
fogeyism about Colonel Newcome? Who, then, can say 
that any character in our contemporary fiction may out- 
live the enthusiasm of the moment? To prophesy is to 
give hostages to fortune. Yet, if one have in criticism 
no courage for blame, or for praise, or even prophecy, 
why write at all? 

The impersonal manner in criticism, the manner of 
Matthew Arnold, carries no conviction to the people of 
to-day. It is a question either of infecting the public 
with one's own enthusiasm, or making them accept the 
justice of one's censure. It is all a matter of personal 
opinion. " This is the way it seems to me " — that is, 
after all, the only conclusion to which any conscientious 
critic can reasonably come. No matter how much the 
would-be impersonal critics befog their words by clinging 
to academic tenets and standards, they never succeed in 
setting forth anything more than their own opinions. 
If one has chosen to cloud one's primal temperament with 
the stored thought of others and of other ages, it is 
merely the lens of one's mind that is changed ; the voiced 
opinion is still but that of the critic behind the voice. 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 139 

If, then, I declare that " The Road to Damascus " is 
a book, and contains a character, worthy of long life, 
I set forth the opinion and the prophesy of but one 
fallible mortal. Mindful of field upon field of broken 
idols, of shattered enthusiasms, and changed moods, I 
make that declaration. The character of Richarda, in 
this book, is one of the finest ever drawn by an Ameri- 
can woman; the book itself has perhaps the broadest 
view of life that has been shown on our side of the water. 

Arresting as is the mere story in this book, and dar- 
ing as are both the premises and the conclusions of the 
plot, it is always the splendid tolerance of human frail- 
ties that constitutes its claim to be considered superior to 
the millions of novels that describe life as we pretend it 
is, or as we pretend it should be. Here is a writer who 
sees life, sees men and women, as they are, not as cen- 
turies of literature have pretended they are. This story 
is of to-day, and it is of all time. At base, humanity 
has always been the same. Surroundings only have 
changed. Observe what one memorable character, Max- 
well, the professor at a college for co-education, is made 
to say: 

" The advancing prices and complexities of modern 
living are probably more productive of many effects which 
have the appearance of an increased morality, than the 
national domestic virtue on which we are apt to plume 
ourselves. Man is compelled to be a monogamist by lack 
of the conditions which would admit of his being a po- 
lygamist." 

Is not that just as if it had come wholesale out of 
Machiavelli? Will you dispute that the essential human 
being differs much, on Manhattan Island to-day, from the 
Florentine under the Medicis? If you will, all the more 
reason why you should read " The Road to Damascus." 
I take it for granted that you have not ; if you had, 
one would not have heard so many worse books more 
talked about. Fortunately the prattle of to-day does 



140 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

not assure the fame that posterity may remark. This was 
a book not to prattle about, but to be thankful for. 
Thankfulness in this case is mine, not only for the book's 
intrinsic merits, but that it enables me to leave, without 
too bitter a taste in the mind, the whole subject of what 
our ladies have done for literature. This book proved 
that, despite much evidence to the contrary, great thought 
and great art could spring from an American woman. 

The central story of the book was without any spe- 
cial American feature. It was the story of a young 
wife who, when it is proved to her that another woman's 
boy should call her own husband father, adopts that boy 
without ever letting her husband know what child he is. 
Than the beautiful wisdom of Richarda, that young wife, 
there has been nothing much finer done. The canvas of 
this book is small, but all the character strokes are firm ; 
there are no mistakes of taste ; and the underlying phi- 
losophy is one that passes the boundaries of conventions 
and creeds old or new. 

Not only is Richarda wise beyond what one had hoped 
was humanly possible ; she is tender and lovable ; the 
scenes between her and the adopted boy, Jack, are true to 
all that is best in the love of women. Rarely, indeed, has 
a woman approached so delicate a problem and so briefly, 
boldly cut it; I do not recall, in all this book, a single 
error of art or of taste. Magnificent as is the task 
Richarda sets herself — to bring up that boy, yet keep 
the father ignorant of her knowledge of his sin — there 
is never a moment when in thought or word or deed she 
is that pestiferous creature, the female prig. The only 
fault that may be found with her, indeed, is that she is 
too perfect; after contact with her marvellous mixture of 
sense and sensibility one comes into intercourse with the 
average human being with too sharp a realisation of 
average humanity's imperfections. That they are a little 
too fine, all the characters in this book, is the only count 
one could conceivably bring against it ; yet to bring it 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 141 

would be to deny that mankind has in it as much fine 
clay as it has coarse. 

Where the book is essentially American is in its ex- 
position of the fallacy of the co-education of the sexes. 
This is to all intents a typically American theory, that 
the sexes can learn the fundamentals of wisdom side by 
side. To expose the fallacy of that argument took no 
little courage. In " The Road to Damascus " are no 
philippics, no floods of passionate special pleading; we 
have, once again, the Machiavellian manner; the facts 
are left to speak for themselves. A typical instance of 
what happens in one of those institutions where budding 
manhood and womanhood are supposed to live and learn 
together in entire oblivion of the sexual stir is told in 
this book so vividly that no sermon could have had as 
powerful a lesson in it. I need quote but a little to prove 
how little the matter of co-education is minced in this 
book: 

" For of such was the freedom accorded to co-educated 
man and maid at Waverley. To insinuate that danger might 
inhere in such latitude of propinquity, would have been re- 
garded as casting a slur upon the morals of American youth, 
and as the deplorable indication of a transatlantic looseness 
of character. The importunity of sex might operate danger- 
ously among peoples bound to be born with uncertain virtue; 
it was otherwise in a land where boys and girls were brought 
up upon those respectable ideals which ignored the possibility 
in themselves of what should decently be classed as abnormal 
tendencies. 

" But Betty Carter could have told the sage innocents 
who undertook to operate a university on a kindergarten 
system, a few truths in regard to the nature of the babes in 
its care which would have shocked them immeasurably. The 
Dean of Waverley also could have added materially to her 
evidence, but he remained non-committal behind his invariable 
smile. For if the people of the State preferred co-education 
on this wide-open plan for their sons and daughters — so be 
it. When a girl rashly shot herself — well, a certain number 



142 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of girls must shoot themselves annually, in deference to statis- 
tical demands. It was not to be supposed that rules and regu- 
lations determining the limits of youthful freedom could avail 
against laws as fixed as the setting of the sun. 

" Laissez f aire ! That was the true American spirit, and 
besides, it was not your daughter." 

Superlatives should, by now, stink in the nostrils of 
the critic who deserves the name ; they have been so abused 
by the press. For years there was a very fury, in Amer- 
ican newspapers, to see who could shout the loudest 
adjectives in praise of the newest book. Judicious folk 
came to avoid whatever was heralded as the " best sell- 
ing," the " most brilliant," or the " most absorbing " ; 
wherever, indeed, a superlative was used, one felt distaste. 
Superlatives were so indiscriminately used that they came 
to mean nothing at all. Of superlatives, then, about 
" The Road to Damascus " I must be chary, even though, 
in my own case as critic, the vice of futile exaggeration 
has been pretty well avoided. You will not, I believe, 
contend that in the main my opinion of our American 
women novelists has shown high. In making H. A. 
Mitchell Keays's book the exception to prove the vicious 
and inartistic rule I should be emphasising my point suf- 
ficiently. Her work was the one ray of pure light; her 
sex has debased our literature and our taste for it ; it has 
flushed us with either the sexual or the too ladylike ; but 
in " The Road to Damascus " you will find the art that 
is greater than sex. The other American women whom 
I have chosen to praise were, in their life and their litera- 
ture, cosmopolitan rather than American ; the author of 
" The Road to Damascus " has remained, so far, an 
American. 

And remains, therefore, the one exception in my in- 
dictment of the evil influence the American woman has ex- 
erted upon our literature. 

Farewell, then, to the ladies! They had their little 



V 



WOMEN, WOMANISTS AND MANNERS 143 

day, the day when people spoke of the age of the woman 
novelist. What they did with that day I have tried to 
tell you. How they debased the true coin of letters, how 
they befouled the fiction of a decade, you have seen by 
my foregoing pages. What they accomplished for good 
weighed but lightly in the balance; but I have tried to 
give it all possible credit. If I have not gone more deeply 
into the merely bread-and-butter contributions they made 
to American literature, it was because examination of 
their positive influences for evil was quite painful enough, 
without considering them negatively. 

Except in casual reference, you are to have no more 
now of the ladies. Their chapter is closed. Already, 
like the world, they have been too much with us ; the air 
is a trifle heavy from them. As gallantly as we could 
we gave them precedence. If now we leave them, we 
would do it as politely as possible. For what we have 
received from them, I trust I have shown my thankful- 
ness. If I have not mentioned this or that lady, I trust 
she will let me know; if we both live, and this book with 
us ; there may yet, in future editions, be opportunity to 
amend my error. At any rate I have done my best to 
make plain the share the dear ladies have had in our lit- 
erary education, — in bringing us to that highly enviable 
state of public taste that has fashioned our literature 
into — what it is. 

We must leave them, true, but we cannot forget them. 
In absence still we may think of them, of what they 
have done for us. See them stand there, as we regretfully 
bid them farewell ; each with a " best seller " in her hand ! 
One has desecrated child-birth; another has played per- 
vert with a legless male ; one has reveled in sluttishness, 
and another only in snobbishness. Some have debauched 
their sex; most of them have sinned against art. They 
stand there still unashamed; 

Under the bludgeonings of — me, 
Their heads are bloody, but unbowed, 



144 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

because there is just one thing that will ever really bring 
surcease to their pernicious activities. That would be 
when the public stopped buying their books. 

Though we bid them farewell, perhaps there is still 
something we can do to find if, towards the art of litera- 
ture, the stir of shame is possible in them. We can point 
out, as contrast to what the ladies achieved in social 
history, what the writers of the other sex did in that 
field. That done, we can come to those fellow-criminals 
of the ladies, namely, the critics, and show how, between 
them, has been reached that condition wherein American 
fiction is a commercial industry, not an art. 

With that promise, then — to think of them a little, 
though no longer specifically engaged with them — 

Ladies — Your Humble Servant ! 



PART TWO 

MEN AND MANNERS 



CHAPTER ONE 

If in this age of the woman novelist the most astound- 
ing achievements in stories of sex were by women, as has 
been shown, in the fiction of contemporary manners, 
where shamelessness was not to count, their score was 
pitiably small compared to that earned by the other sex. 
The most passing glance at some of the Englishmen who 
wrote novels of manners in that period, should prove 
my assertion. Both in the quality of their art, and in 
the value of their chronicles of contemporary life, they 
were the superiors of the women writers. To choose but a 
few, those that have most appealed to me were Robert 
Hichens, E. F. Benson, Richard Pryce, and John Gals- 
worthy. 

The work of all these, individually and collectively, has 
suggested much that is pertinent to the present argument. 
No writer of either sex has so mirrored in English the 
life and heart of a national character as has John Gals- 
worthy. Save in French such delicate handling of a 
dangerous detail as was in " The Successor " is not to 
be found in recent fiction ; to compare that work with such 
sex stuff as I began my book with is to compare the 
razor with the shillelagh. Hichens has written a series 
of social studies that deserve, inasmuch as they chronicle 
not only a certain side of modern social England, but 
his own growth as artist, careful critical attention. 
" Dodo " Benson has offered a series, almost as long as 
that of Hichens, of stories that have been remarkable 
examples of how, with genuine talent, it is yet possible to 
be ridiculous. I thought fit to include him, not only 
because of his very real achievements, but in order to 
keep in countenance that galaxy of ladies from which 
with such regret we lately tore ourselves away. 



148 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Against these, we have in America the work only of 
men like Robert Chambers, Graham Phillips, and Win- 
ston Churchill, who, as chroniclers of the life about us, 
can at best be said to be making a good beginning. 

Neither Englishman nor American, but something of 
both, is Henry James. Him we are to consider last. 

It is the career of Robert Hichens I would ask you 
to note first. 

For some years it looked as if Hichens might become 
the victim of his too great cleverness. In his earlier 
books there was the fatal gift of too much humor; the 
irony in " The Green Carnation " and " The Londoners " 
and " The Slave " was approached, in America, only by 
the work of Edgar Saltus and the author of " The Imi- 
tator." What happened to Mr. Saltus we have already 
seen. As to the other book, I have in my possession docu- 
mentary evidence of the number of American publishers 
who thought the book " too clever." It afforded lively 
proof of the profit, in American literature, of being dull. 

Dullness, Mr. Hichens never achieved. It was always 
brilliance, in matter and in manner, that he gave us. 

Coming into our ken first with " The Green Carnation," 
a sparkling satire posed as a key-novel, Mr. Hichens 
made more than one essay into that field of the fleshly 
phrase which so fully occupied the ladies to whom I de- 
voted the first part of my book. " The Green Carnation " 
burlesqued the Oscar Wilde period of English estheticism 
as keenly as did Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta of " Pa- 
tience " ; it belongs in the history of that movement. Al- 
most every character in the story had its obvious, notori- 
ous original; many of the epigrams or paradoxes were 
as clever as those of Wilde himself. The personality of 
Wilde, the fashionable pose he typified, and even the 
prose he worked in, were hit off in " The Green Carna- 
tion " to the life and letter. 

It was in " Flames " that Mr. Hichens made his bold- 



MEN AND MANNERS 149 

est venture into the suggestive. In sheer brilliance he 
surpassed anything that the shameless sex had done; 
unfortunately he was not far behind them in his efforts 
to be, in print, as wicked as possible. It was characteris- 
tic of the trend of Mr. Hichens' mind at that time that 
his greatest artistic success in " Flames " was the de- 
scription of Cuckoo Bright, a horizontally minded young 
woman whose forte was Piccadilly Circus. Most of the 
other characters in the story were but dummies clothed 
in glittering syllables ; clear and human was only the 
delineation of this member of the Oldest Profession — 
as Kipling insists. Until Margarethe Boehme wrote the 
German book already considered, Cuckoo Bright was the 
farthest step that had been made in that direction. 

Mr. Hichens's whole mental attitude, at that time, 
adapted itself to the various unpleasant colors on the 
canvas of this book. His language and his similes were 
those of one who looked at life from the pose of utter 
depravity. He spoke of the relation between youth and 
life as a " liaison," and called orchids the " Messalinas of 
the hot-house." Though he was by no means first in 
adapting the synonyms of fleshliness, — since the gen- 
tleman who called Offenbach's music a cocotte had been 
dead a long time, — he excelled, in the luxuriance of his 
vice-tainted phrases, anything accomplished by his rivals 
of the other sex. If he had not in his later work proved 
his place as a serious artist, as well as a facile writer, he 
would have fallen through " Flames " into as despicable 
a case as the feminists I have cited. 

Aside from its phraseology, " Flames " was elaborate 
burlesque, and it was only in the spirit of burlesque that 
the critic could treat it. So to treat it, to-day, has its 
value ; it proves how too much humor, too great brilliance, 
too facile a trick in paradox, can hinder rather than help 
the career of a literary artist. 

Valentine Cresswell, in " Flames," was the saint of 



150 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Victoria Street. Also he was like an ivory statue, had 
the melodies of wandering organs singing in his ascetic 
ears, and a habit of becoming serious toward midnight. 
This habit I cannot too fiercely condemn. The case of 
Mr. Cresswell should be a perpetual warning beacon. 
Although there was a time when Valentine was not on 
speaking terms with love, hate, despair, ^desire or any 
other emotion — in his ivory statue state, in fact — his 
habit of becoming serious toward midnight brought him 
to a point where he asked himself why he should be like 
" a bird hovering over it all " instead of being " in it." 
After that, it is to be recorded that he began to be 
distinctly in it, though still — nay, all the more, deserving 
the name of " a bird." The actual transition was by 
way of spiritualistic sittings. Valentine, after much mid- 
night brooding, had become convinced that he was tired 
of being so utterly good, so untempted, and that it might 
be splendid to change souls with Julian, a stalwart young 
friend of his, who had a fashion of lying about in " an 
unbuttoned attitude." Mr. Hichens attempted to show 
that Julian was an entirely good young man who had 
once been otherwise, and been saved by the ivory example 
of Valentine. But for my part I had my suspicions the 
moment I read of his unbuttoned attitudes. They may 
be exciting, but they are not in good taste. So there 
need have been no surprise over the change that came to 
Julian after the sittings. 

There were four of these sittings. At first there was 
nothing noteworthy, except that the curtain moved and 
the dog howled. But neither Sorosis nor Mrs. Eddy would 
think that anything wonderful. It was at the fourth that 
things began to happen ; Valentine fell into a trance. 
As he awoke from it, his friend, Julian, observed a small 
flame wandering forth from him, and escaping with a 
slight cry. Whereupon the dog also abruptly left Valen- 
tine's embrace. I could not blame that dog. The sight 



MEN AND MANNERS 151 

and sound of a flame issuing from the person chosen as 
a divan is not helpful to quiescence. How was the dog 
to know it was Valentine's soul that had so fared forth? 
Only Mr. Hichens knew that. 

Yes, it was Valentine's soul, was that little flame, and 
its place in the soul business was taken by the soul of 
a person named Marr, conveniently dead, as to the body, 
at that precise moment. Marr had suggested the sittings, 
and was otherwise an abominable person. Therewith be- 
gan the dominance of Marr's soul, through Valentine's 
body, over Julian. The latter continued his habit of 
seeing flames. He met Cuckoo Bright, whose hat yelled, 
when it did not happen to be merely crying out, and he 
saw a flame in her eyes. That flame was the soul of 
Valentine looking for a home. Julian did not know that 
when he saw it, but we had Mr. Hichens' word for it. 
Miss Bright, strange to say, in spite of the fact that " a 
shrill scent of cherry-blossoms ran with her like a crowd " 
— an accompaniment that I should think likely to frighten 
even the hardiest of male creatures ! — was destined to be 
the influence for good over Julian. 

Still, even in spite of the flame in Cuckoo's eyes, 
Julian, following the guidance of the new Valentine, 
managed to be a pretty weird specimen of the utterly 
depraved. After continued association with the new, per- 
verted edition of Valentine — merely an elaborated Dorian 
Grey — Julian " had acquired such a taste for low com- 
pany that he ought to have been born a peer." The 
color of his face became that of a misty cloud. The 
misty cloud, in faces, is fatal. And so, though Cuckoo 
prayed for him, and fought for him, Julian was doomed. 
His descent began the day that Valentine, Cuckoo and 
he went to the Empire, to watch the ballet, and take part 
in the promenading. It was evidently not during the 
consulship of Mrs. Ormiston Chant, for during their walk 
" an elderly woman with yellow hair and a fat-lined 



152 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

face enveloped him in her skirts of scarlet and black 
striped silk." Of course, Julian never recovered from 
that ; he never came out of the mud again. Considering 
what had enveloped him, can we wonder? He went surely 
down hill, became what nice people call horrid, and died 
fighting against becoming worse. 

That was at another sitting. There were Valentine, 
Julian, Dr. Levillier, and Cuckoo. The doctor was a 
famous nerve-specialist, who treated the " sane lunatics 
of society," the lunatics who turn " love into an adul- 
terous sensation." Still, the doctor was a pretty good 
chap ; he had become interested in the flame business ; 
and the flame business was going strong that day. The 
flame of the real Valentine hovered about Julian all dur- 
ing the sitting, while Marr, in the body of Valentine, was 
doing its flamingest to enter into the body of Julian. 
Julian saved the day by dying, and the scene closed with 
the spectacle of the flames of Valentine and Julian soar- 
ing skyward, hand in hand, as it were, while the body of 
Valentine, polite to the last, crumbled softly to ashes. 
Cuckoo and the doctor remained alive. That was some- 
thing to be glad of. Cuckoo was a person who had suf- 
fered much, who had walked many thousands of miles over 
the stones of Piccadilly, and who, though she was badly 
made up, consumptively rouged and had hair that was 
dreadfully dyed, was still more bearable than the two 
male figures that flickered about these pages. 

Considered seriously, " Flames " remains interesting 
enough in marking the artistic progress of its author. 
It was brilliant continuously, though often unpleasantly. 
Its transference of souls theory has been employed by 
many living novelists ; brushing aside such buncombe as 
Corelli's " Ziska," there is Mr. Benson's " Image in the 
Sand," to which reference will be made later, and the 
anonymously issued " The Imitator." The latter came 
most closely to Mr. Hichens's story of jumping souls, as 



MEN AND MANNERS 153 

also it most closely approached the satire and the cari- 
cature in " The Green Carnation." 

To the " Green Carnation " manner Mr. Hichens re- 
turned in " The Londoners." He had determined, evi- 
dently, to escape completely from the semi-mysticism of 
" Flames," and hark back to the flippant manner in which 
he first wrote of London society. In " The Londoners " 
he achieved a frivolity and a grotesqueness that ap- 
proached the manner of a cynical showman exhibiting 
the paces of a number of locoed broncos. It was as if he 
had determined, in his own words, already quoted from 
" Flames," to treat of " the sane lunatics of society." 
The story was so fantastic as to be farce rather than 
fiction. Once irritation at the foolishness of the farce was 
over, we had to allow that the book was full of amusing 
situations and amazing caricatures. 

The most bearable of all this lunatic company was 
Mrs. Verulam. Though she was the fashion, the favorite 
of all London, she was dying to escape from society; she 
likened herself to a squirrel turning in its cage ; she 
wanted a taste of the country. So we have the house 
party at Ribton Marshes, where we can verily fancy our- 
selves in the politest ward of the insanest asylum. A 
Bun Emperor had vacated Ribton Marshes for Mrs. Veru- 
lam. All the people in this party revolved in a glare of 
foolery that proved the author unwilling to take Lon- 
don society seriously. The six detectives whom the Bun 
Emperor had distributed about his place to keep his 
property from being destroyed or stolen ; the rustic tem- 
porarily adored of Mrs. Verulam because he smacked so 
strongly of the soil; these were but mildly amusing; but 
such a picture as that of Lady Drake and the penny-in- 
the-slot machine was not easily seen without laughter. 
Trying to quench her nocturnal appetite she engaged in 
a bout with this machine, one of the Bun Emperor's pets, 
and was found, finally, " seated on the floor in an Eastern 



154 _ THEIR DAY IN COURT 

position, attired in an Indian shawl, with her lap full of 
cigars, brandy balls, coppers, luggage labels, boxes of 
pills, sticks of chocolate, rolls of curl papers, pear-drops 
and sealing-wax." 

To do Mr. Hichens justice, he did for London society 
in that book what has never been done for New York in 
any well-known novel. (" The Imitator," as has been 
pointed out, was never sufficiently known.) He boldly, 
smilingly lampooned it, yet one could see the likeness 
through the caricature. His dialogue, his tone, his sur- 
face glitter, denoted an observation of, and an immersion 
in, his subject, such as few had attempted on either side 
of the Atlantic. Clyde Fitch, in the first act of " The 
Moth and the Flame," came nearest to " The London- 
ers," but his picture of society in a mood of fantastic 
frolic was nothing like so clever as Mr. Hichens's. The 
account of the affairs at the Unattached Club, where a 
lecture on the Holy Land was given in a darkness that 
allowed everyone to hear everyone's else remarks about 
themselves, and all the newcomers to sit down unwittingly 
in the laps of the ladies, was a delicious bit of satire. 
The figure of Ingerstall, the artist, with his everlasting 
appeal to the superiority of France in everything, was 
equally memorable. Do we not know that pose? In our 
parlor-cars, our steamers de luxe, have we not observed 
that attitude until we sicken? 

Something of what is best in raillery shines from the 
passage in which Ingerstall takes Bush, the counti'3 T man, 
among the roundabouts (in American: merry-go-rounds) 
at Ascot: 

" He has the artistic sense; he understands the exquisite 
poetry of vulgarity; the inwardness of the cocoanut-shy, the 
extraordinary elements of the picturesque which appear in the 
staring face of Madame Aunt Sally, open-mouthed to re- 
ceive the provender shot at her by Hodge and Harriet. He 
knows well the bizarre and beautiful effect upon the nervous 



MEN AND MANNERS 155 

system of that strange combination of the arts of music and 
motion — the rundabout. He " 

"The roundabout?" interrupted the Duchess. 

" Didn't I say so? " 

" You've been riding? " said the Duke to Mr. Bush. " Good 
exercise — good for the liver ! Good for the muscles ! Did 
you ever get a decent horse ? " 

Mr. Bush burst forth into a loud guffaw. 

" Splendid animal ! " cried Mr. Ingerstall. " I rode a pink, 
he a delicate — a really very delicate-apple-green with sulphur- 
colored spots. The music was that extremely pathetic com- 
position, ' Write Me a Letter from Home.' I should have 
preferred ' Quand Les Amoureux S'En Vent Deux Par Deux.' 
Still, the other did really very well. After dismounting — Bush 
was thrown by the way — we spent half an hour in a tent 
with the bottle-imp. Paris would like it. And then we pressed 
on to the two-faced lady, ending up with a cocoanut-shy which 
Whistler would love to paint. I really never enjoyed an 
Ascot so much — never ! " 

The fun poked by Mr. Hichens at the moneyed invaders 
of town and country fashion in England was both enter- 
taining and instructive, marking, as it did, a period be- 
fore cosmopolitanism and dollars had come to be taken 
for granted in London. He was still fluent in paradox 
and epigram; his personages all somewhat too clever in 
their conversation. Reading Hichens was like eating 
game when it is high. 

The coruscant chatter in " The Londoners " and the 
posturings in " The Green Carnation " were vividly re- 
called in many pages of that finer and larger story " The 
Slave." The talk that obtained at Lady St. Ormyn's 
garden-party at Epsom was such talk as only Mr. 
Hichens had ever given us. Yet sparkling as Mr. 
Hichens's manner of treating the fashionable and frivo- 
lous Londoners was, the discriminating reader knew his 
brilliant insincerity to be a deliberate phase of art; he 



156 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was giving us, as nearly as possible, the actual voice and 
thought of the average creature in that set which for a 
decade or so England and America conspired to call 
" smart." 

That phase of Mr. Hichens's art reached its highest 
point in " The Slave." Obviously exaggerated as some 
of his scenes, and speeches, and persons, were, he here 
proved himself one of the writers from whose pages the 
future historian can construct again that century-end 
Society. Primarily, the story was of music and jewels. 
Music and jewels — surely few things have ever more ap- 
pealed to the senses of our fashionables. To gauge the 
curious sensuousness with which the souls of some of us 
cling to the glamour of music and of jewels; to give, even 
to complete slavishness at the feet of those idols, a mystic 
charm and a never tiring fascination — to do this was to 
be at once a true artist and a nice judge of the social 
firmament and its tastes. Who can deny that about 
music and jewels once centred the interest of our society? 
The Opera was the fashion, and singers were the fashion ; 
to the Opera one must come sparkling with jewels ; round 
and about those intermingling attractions flitted and flut- 
tered a swarm of social moths and butterflies. Even the 
newspapers recognised the value of gems and their owner- 
ship ; nothing was supposed to appeal more directly to 
the proletariat's romantic aspirations than the news that 
Mrs. Hyphenblank had lost her diamonds, or that the 
great Spanish ruby had been sold to the wife of an oil 
or beer millionaire; or that such and such an actress 
wore a bushel or so of brilliants in her famous falling-up 
stairs scene. 

This canvas in " The Slave " showed the centre of our 
English-speaking society stirred equally by music and 
by jewels ; it vividly sketches the whole social attitude to- 
ward the Opera and toward singers ; it was colored 
throughout with a fine and rational art ; and it had both 
the composition that made a telling total, and the care 



MEN AND MANNERS 157 

for detail that denoted an amateur of miniature. The 
impression the book made was powerful. The author lured 
us most effectively into appreciating Lady Caryll's in- 
human passion for jewels. To say that such an obsession 
is impossible is to lack faith in the infinite possibilities of 
the human senses. The skill with which Mr. Hichens in- 
troduced her passion for gems ; the delicate gradations 
with which he disclosed, more and more sharply, the ab- 
solute slave she was — all brought us to realisation that 
her madness was no more grotesque than the madness of 
many another woman for a man. If we could not consider 
Lady Caryll as purely human, it was only because in 
many of the highest efflorescences of an aristocracy there 
is ever a touch of the inhuman. Equally inhuman seemed 
Sir Reuben, the wizened little semi-Oriental whom Lady 
Caryll married for the sake of the jewels he could give 
her. Not even Mr. Marion Crawford's Mr. Isaacs was 
more armored with all the romantic glamour of jewels. 
Through the mouth of Sir Reuben Mr. Hichens gave us 
the very essence of the poetry in precious stones. Few 
women can have read those pages in " The Slave " with- 
out comprehending something of that passion which ruled 
Lady Caryll. 

It was to jewels that Lady Caryll was a slave, and 
so gave title to the book; but in the main canvas music 
was an equally dominant note. It was round about the 
subject of Opera — Opera, ballad-singers, fashionable 
pianists, and fashionable adoration of them all — that most 
of the social caricatures in " The Slave " centred. " Lon- 
don women," Mr. Hichens told us, " love the impudence 
of fat little foreigners who can sing and who are famous." 
Mr. Hichens had once been a critic of music ; he knew what 
he was talking about; and he never talked more bril- 
liantly. If ever there was doubt as to the real reason 
why society favored the Opera, " The Slave " must have 
dispelled it. The crowd of fashionables who prattled of 
music and musicians in those pages ; the singers who used 



158 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

their art merely as means to the end of sensuous vic^ 
tories — all these were slaves to their senses, and were the 
debauchees of music. If George Moore had given us in 
" Evelyn Innes " a wonderful picture of a singer and 
her attitude toward her art ; if he gave us page on page 
of valuable elucidation of the history and mystery of 
early English music ; no less did Mr. Hichens set down 
definitely the attitude of English society toward music 
and its makers. Mr. Moore had no humor; Mr. Hichens 
perhaps too much; yet that even his veriest nonsense was 
delicious, as his description of a set musicale, few would 
care to deny. And just as in " Flames " we had, amid 
the other absurdities, many fine pages about certain sides 
and scenes of London as it was at the close of the 19th 
century, so in " The Slaves " we had many vivid scenes 
from London life " during the fashionable two months 
and a half of the year." 

The fashionables of New York must have recognised 
their own attitude toward music, and their own foibles, 
in these sketches ; for they did not differ essentially from 
London. Some of the society's pets were caricatured 
broadly; these caricatures belong to the history of our 
time. Mme. Melba was there, drawn to the life. Lady 
St. Ormyn, who listened " violently " ; who always had 
" an opera box close to the stage, so that she could beck 
and nod to the singers, and ask them to lunch when they 
were kissing their hands before the curtain ; and to whom 
noise, of the Wagner species, " gave an agreeable sensa- 
tion in the small of the back " — did we not know her 
well? Lady De Gray, or Hilda Higgins, or a blend of 
both, had been the London original of Lady St. Ormyn; 
New York was easily able to name an original also. Then 
there was Monsieur Anneau, " very tall, very broad, with 
a dyed beard and fevered eyes," who sang about God 
and about flowers, but always meant a woman ; and of 
whom Lady Caryll said, to his face, that he and the Bon 
Dieu had not even a bowing acquaintance. Do we not 



MEN AND MANNERS 159 

know him? Pol Plancon, beloved in the Metropolitan 
and in polite drawing-rooms, was the original of half of 
that blend; the virility and the love o' women of Victor 
Maurel completed the portrait. Barre was the composer 
Faure ; and Bredelli " the fat little foreigner," who said 
" Give me the women and I have the world " was Tosti 
the song-writer. 

Through its tinsel of scintillant speech, and its gay 
caricatures, this story of " The Slave " was a vigorous 
arraignment of modern society. In sheer brilliance, in 
biting social satire, Mr. Hichens never surpassed it. Few 
other writers of our time ever equaled it. 

Not until Mr. Hichens wrote " The Garden of Allah " 
did his art completely find itself. 

High as hopes of him might have been, strong as was 
the memory of his best pages, never had we been led to 
expect such a gem as this. Too often the fatal gift 
of humor had twisted his early work awry; the fine pity 
that marked his sketch of Cuckoo in " Flames " did not 
atone for the fantastic absurdities that marked that 
book as an entity. All his books had marked his power 
over English prose; most of them had been fairly suc- 
cessful, by the world's reckoning; but most of them had 
failed in reaching beyond a certain level. " The Garden 
of Allah " touched a level of excellence of its own ; it 
branded its author as perilously near genius. 

The paramount passion, love, had been but faintly 
sung in English prose. The French can point to more 
than one masterpiece wherein music and color joined be- 
fore that shrine which in Anglo-Saxon artists had in- 
duced little save timidity. But in English ! Memory 

went tapping about among the well-laid ghosts of the 
lightly living figments that had marked the English novel 
during the last generation ; the faintest, most fragmentary 
echoes responded. A page here had raised hopes ; a chap- 
ter elsewhere spurred expectation ; none went beyond the 
dream; fulfilled completely the fleeting promise. Until 



160 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Mr. Hichens wrote " The Garden of Allah " the possibili- 
ties of our language in artistically reproducing the poetry 
and the pity in the greatest of human passions had been 
but faintly realised. 

A considerable assertion, yet, to my mind, incontestible. 
You must go back to the great Frenchman who con- 
ceived " A Passion in the Desert," or to that still living 
French lieutenant who wrote a " Book of Pity and of 
Death," for anything akin to this achievement. Huys- 
mans, Flaubert and Loti, all strangely dissimilar, yet 
strangely related, had put quivering pages upon our 
memories ; I recall those vivid chapters of George Moore's 
about the singer who became a nun — that, too, was Huys- 
mans filtered past Philistia ! — and that delightful filigree 
John Oliver Hobbes wrought about the childhood of Rob- 
ert Orange ; but nothing in English had been so splendid 
in its color, so potent in its passion, so perfect in its 
sway over the reader, as " The Garden of Allah." Here 
was English prose written with the poetry of passion, as 
well as with the passion of poetry; yet nothing was far- 
ther from that fatal thing: prose poetry. It was prose 
that so conveyed details as to start the thought: Why, 
this is realism, naturalism, veritism! and then to fling 
that thought aside as ridiculously inadequate to convey 
a notion of the vigorous impressionism in color and music 
which swept this romance and its minutest iotas upon 
our intelligence. 

The Desert of Sahara, that was the Garden of Allah 
It was to the desert that the vital personages in this 
romance came, seeking peace, forgetfulness, passion and 
health ; and finding them all. The plot — the details in 
winch I need not now revive — was the plot of passion ; 
from one crescendo we rose to another; wooing, wedding, 
and final revelation were all merged in splendid coherence. 
The magic of the desert held the reader bound ; the mys- 
tery in the passionate plot was one with that magic. 
The human passion and the passion and peace of the 



MEN AND MANNERS 161 

desert fused and blended, until the reader felt something 
akin to exhaustion when the book was over and done 
with. We had walked with one who flung the colors of 
an Arnold Boecklin and a Jonas Lie — the painter, not 
the writer — upon his canvas. We had heard the sym- 
phony of the desert, a symphony that closed with mag- 
nificent courage upon a note of passionate renunciation. 
We had been in the enchantment of the East. 

The call of the East assuredly came strongly to Mr. 
Hichens. Following that call he brought noble gifts 
home. Something of what is older than the oldest of the 
Arabian Nights mingled with what is most modern in the 
cry for that East " where the best is like the worst." He 
painted the desert for us, its magic, its passion and its 
solitude, so that one doubts if it can ever be done again. 
The desert villages, with their cafes, their dancers, their 
self-torturing fanatics, their sand-diviners — who tell the 
future as it spills from the grains of sand — and their 
" alleys of women " ; we could note everything vividly 
and exactly. Everywhere was the keen vision of realism, 
yet everywhere the poetry of passion. The desert by 
day, in a hundred changing aspects of beauty and of 
brass ; the desert by night ; at every moment of the sun 
and moon and stars. Always and everywhere the desert ; 
always and everywhere, passion. The desert was the 
garden of Allah ; and we came to know all that garden's 
paths. Passion, faith, religion, all swayed to the do- 
minion of the desert. We saw it mightier than the sea, 
mightier than the Past or the Future. We succumbed 
to its spell. 

That, waiving the plot of human passion which moved 
through the book, was the triumph of " The Garden of 
Allah." Picture upon picture one could quote, painting 
the manifold moods and powers of the desert; yet, shorn 
of their settings, these would be but poor gems by which 
to judge this brilliant achievement. I can but ask you — 
if you are so unfortunate as never to have read the book 



162 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

— to believe that, by the magic of a fine artist, we were 
transported to a land of vivid, glaring colors and pas- 
sions. All modern civilisation was made to seem far 
in the background; those were what the travelers had 
wished to escape. These splendid spaces of sand, of sun, 
of violence yet of peace, of fatefulness and of solitude ; 
these were the things they had come to find. Upon page 
after page Mr. Hichens poured the sparkle and glow of 
color and music, until we realised the sway which sheer 
beautiful writing can exert. Not for a moment do I 
mean the vicious anomaly called " fine writing." No, this 
was real magic; carrying us into the secret heart of the 
desert ; and proving to us how slightly we care about 
the actual action in a story if the magician be potent 
enough. 

The note of passion was throbbing, pulsing, singing 
everywhere, as passion had seldom sung through Eng- 
lish prose. That passion made, too, for great drama. 
The scene wherein AndrowsJcy, minded to take train and 
set himself beyond Domini and temptation, came up 
through the garden of Count Anteoni, murmuring his 
farewells to all the flowers and all the walks; saw Domini 
sitting there, and from " I came to say good-bye " passed 
to " I love you," was a scene so instinct with the magic, 
tangible yet illusory, of the theatre, that I have never 
been able to see how our homm^s de Theatre have so long 
passed it by. Surely the scenic artist, as well as the 
players, would be given great moments in that scene. An 
equally splendid passage was that of the wedding-night. 
Great drama and great prose. If one had been in the 
habit of thinking such matters purely French provinces, 
Mr. Hichens proved otherwise. 

Over all, in this book, was the dominance of religious 
devotion. Faith throbbed with passion ; passion with 
faith. There was not a line of orthodoxy in the book. 
Yet many, whether pagan, Trappist, Arab, Mohamme- 



MEN AND MANNERS 163 

dan, or Christian, might take firmer hold on their gods 
after reading " The Garden of Allah." Yet to suggest 
any purpose at all in this book is to diminish praise. I 
think Mr. Hichens had no purpose in writing it, save the 
purpose of all great art, expression. " The Garden of 
Allah " was indeed great art, greatly expressed. 

Mr. Hichens never reached that height again. His art 
there touched its maximum. He might well have laid his 
pen down then and there; had he not written one fine 
book? What he did afterwards never — so far, at any 
rate — approached that story of the desert in effective- 
ness. He tried often enough, afterwards, to lead us 
again into passion's garden of enchantment ; too often, 
however, one heard but feeble echoes of notes once sweet, 
and heard the crackling of thorns under a boiling pot. 

In " The Call of the Blood " and " A Spirit in Prison," 
for instance, he tried again to pass on to us something 
of the Orient's impassioned color. He showed, again, the 
sun in dominance; but the blue sea and sky of Sicily 
instead of the desert's glare. Here, under the shadow of 
Etna, we were asked to watch the sun drawing forth the 
Sicilian soul dormant in the body of an apparently Eng- 
lish youth. On the text, " Our blood governs us when 
the time comes," one story was builded. Instead of the 
desert's garden of Allah we had the pastoral beauties of 
Sicily; desire, and the yielding to it, transformed that 
garden of paradise into a field as tragic and as bare 
as was the African desert at close of the earlier story. 
Tragedy of renouncement as " The Garden of Allah " 
was, we left it, not only surcharged with its passion, but 
uplifted by its faith. In " The Call of the Blood," bril- 
liant as were the hues in which the victories of the South, 
of the sun, were painted for us, they held nothing at all 
of hope. The passion that was denied in the garden of 
Allah, purely pagan though it was, still seemed to give 



164 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

promises to our optimism; in the later spectacle of the 
tragic triumph of a man's blood we saw only the most 
relentless, most Oriental, most hopeless of philosophies. 

In brilliance we have, in America, no novelist who ap- 
proached Mr. Hichens. Neither " The Slave " nor " The 
Garden of Allah " have been equaled on this side of the 
Atlantic. The one, as a specimen of social caricature ; 
the other, of really artistic prose. 

The case of Mr. Hichens, finally, is pertinent to one 
of my fundamental arguments, namely that our Amer- 
ican productivity makes for everything save fine art. 
Professor William James has asserted that without too 
much we cannot have enough of anything, and that the 
production of what he termed — doubtless with uninten- 
tional colloquialism — " lots " of inferior books was a con- 
dition of the few precious specimens being realised. That 
assertion can never be sufficiently rebuked; to prove it 
mistaken in premise and conclusion is one of the reasons 
for my writing this book. Our spread of superficial edu- 
cation in America has brought us to a point where you 
cannot throw a stone without hitting a novelist ; yet the 
search for the real art of writing is more futile than ever 
before. We have millions of books, and no book; every- 
one can have books printed, and none has thought it 
necessary to know how to write. If we pat ourselves on 
the back because of the abundance of our literary pro- 
duction, we might as well applaud the rabbit. Our pro- 
fessors, of philosophy and statistics, need never grow 
anxious — not in this generation, at any rate! — lest a 
lethargy overcome our fecund fictionists ; if they, with the 
ladies, and the newspapers, have their way, we shall 
eventually be submerged, like Atlantis, under an ocean 
of ink. Their scorn for the precious in art leads them 
to keep wide open that gate to literature, which should 
be kept tight barred against all the fools, women and 
children, who now cumber the way. 



CHAPTER TWO 

The work of Mr. E. F. Benson, while it has chrono- 
logically and in many other ways paralleled that of Mr. 
Hichens, has always filled the critic with very mixed sen- 
sations. Indubitably brilliant, a thorough craftsman in 
English prose, he has given us a series of novels that 
irritated as often as they entertained. As a writer, pure 
and simple, his stature was considerable; as an inventor 
of plots he has gradually been succumbing to occult in- 
fluences that may kill him, as artist, as surely as a so- 
called Christian Science killed what was mortal in Harold 
Frederic. 

At first Mr. Benson was satisfied with social satire. 
His " Dodo " remains still memorable for its brilliance of 
dialogue, its paradoxic attitudes, and its caricatures di- 
rect from fashionable life in the England of that day. 
That Dorothy Tennant, afterwards the wife of Henry 
M. Stanley, was generally considered Dodo's original, is 
well known. 

Unfortunately Mr. Benson overplayed his luck. In his 
later books, which continued the satiric vein of " Dodo," 
he wearied us as often as he amused us. Paradox that 
reeks more of machinery than spontaneity is as tiresome 
as stupidity. To attempt a monotony of brilliance is as 
dispiriting as to achieve unillumined dulness. When all 
the smart people in Mr. Benson's books talked in nothing 
but paradox, and never had any morals save those in- 
duced- by fashion, the hothouse flavor became rather in- 
supportable. His books were clever; unfortunately, they 
were little else. And that, for a novelist, is not enough. 
To be merely clever, in this day and age, is to fail. 
165 



166 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

One of Mr. Benson's novels called " Mammon & Co." 
was typical both of his cleverness and his failures. He 
tried therein to mirror the life, the ways and the speeches 
of the smartest London set ; he tried to disclose the in- 
nate heartlessness and shallowness of that set, yet bring 
his story to an ending that would seem a moral and a 
warning. He tried to make capital of the Hooley method 
of bribing peers into posing on the directorates of rotten 
stock companies ; he swept his brush over large spaces — 
yet he made no impression. His epigrams fell flat ; the 
picture of society was so full of the artist's own insin- 
cerity as to lose its tints ; and the " good " ending came, 
for all the world, like a " slump " in the stock market. 
That Mr. Benson could write was abundantly proven ; 
but he was too full of the merely superficial cynicism in- 
duced by the set of society he mirrored ; he appealed only 
to the fashionables and to the females, and not at all to 
the great human entity. Humanity was rare in his pages. 
Unbalanced by an equal share of kindliness, his satire 
flashed in countless sparks that were snuffed out and 
forgotten. 

Between those two stools, in fact, Mr. Benson, as nov- 
elist, has always fallen : brilliance and bourgeoisie. He 
labored to shine, until one saw only his laboring. He 
made his appeal to that feminine section of society whose 
taste and influence have had such pernicious influence on 
all our letters ; he, who began as a brilliant youth, bril- 
liantly, is now busy attempting conventional melodrama 
for " the ladies in the boxes." 

In " Mammon & Co." there were, however, occasional 
gleams of entertainment. There was the American ma- 
tron, Mrs. Murchison, an obvious caricature of the fan- 
tastic figure that gossip had drawn of Mrs. Leiter. Mr. 
Benson even went so far as to repeat that ancient libel, 
in which an inquirer as to whether her daughter is deli- 
cate is answered : " Oh, no ; she's the most indelicate 
girl ! " Some of the lines in this caricature were funny 



MEN AND MANNERS 167 

enough, as when Mrs. Murchison, considering her daugh- 
ter, dreams to herself: "Some day my darling will go 
in to dinner before her own mother," and when it is told 
of her that " to be found dead among a heap of Duch- 
esses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the 
forefront of the battle." Also, she was never able to get 
over the habit of saying " Very pleased to make your 
acquaintance." 

A certain unhealthiness of atmosphere that was later 
to become Mr. Benson's most congenial air could already 
be marked in " Mammon & Co." He gave a picture of a 
peer, Ted Comber, which was distinctly unwholesome. 
He took ladies' magazines, did embroidery, and danced 
beautifully. He went to his hair-dresser's constantly to 
have grey hairs taken out, and had all the vices without 
any of the virtues of an old-time beau. That picture of 
Comber is to be remembered in any critical consideration 
of Mr. Benson ; it was the first sketch for the more elabo- 
rate portrait of Beckwith in " Paul," issued several years 
later. That Mr. Benson should so repeat himself was 
but one of the many proofs of his artistic decline. 

Manifold as were the views of fashionable English life 
attempted in " Mammon & Co.," the book was rank with 
imperfections. Society's worship at the money shrine was 
incorporated in the picture; there were descriptions of 
just such baccarat episodes as the newspapers told of 
Tranby Croft; fashionable morals were exposed as some- 
what hideous ; yet the book was not a good novel either 
of the money mania nor of sex problems. Its chief value 
was in showing, so early in Mr. Benson's career, whither 
tiresome verbal gymnastics, unwholesome atmosphere and 
conventional bourgeoisie would eventually bring him. 

Never, since then, has Mr. Benson been convincing in 
his art. Almost every story he gave us was tinged with 
the occult, in intention ; with the ridiculous, in actual 
effect. He seemed to have made up his mind to supply 



168 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

the novel-reading public with a human menagerie that 
would rival Hagenbeck's, to say nothing of Maskelyne & 
Cook. One fad after another engaged him as a builder 
of plots ; spiritualism, theosophy, Pan and the return to 
Nature, and others. He covered many hundreds of pages ; 
he did much good writing; and he never succeeded in 
being anything but artistically absurd. 

It was simply impossible to take him seriously. 

Consider that curious jumble of the occult and the 
ridiculous called " The Image in the Sand." Ambitious, 
and utterly futile. The story was entertaining just where 
it pretended to be instructive; it had no value in enlarg- 
ing our notions of the occult for the reason that it made 
the whole business ridiculous. It tried to give you trag- 
edy, and you found only trouble. The atmosphere of 
conviction was never there. You allowed Mr. Benson's 
talent, but you allowed, also, that the book never for an 
instant impressed you. This story of the occult, of 
spirits called from the dead past and affecting, for ill or 
well, the living, moved us no more than the exhibitions 
of a parlor magician. Maskelyne & Cook, when we were 
children, used to do the thing much better in the old 
Egyptian Hall. Despite the pages showing the heroine 
in travail of soul, devout in communion with the spirit of 
her dead father, the actual air of make-believe was utterly 
absent; we saw simply the old, familiar machinery of the 
spiritualists and table-rappers. Had Mr. Benson treated 
his material ironically, as Gelett Burgess did in " The 
Heart Line," this might have been well enough ; but he 
expected us to take all these phenomena and tragedies 
seriously, and, doing so, became himself a laughing-stock. 

Mr. Benson did not even call on his imagination for 
new devices ; he used the stock tricks, treated them with 
great seriousness, and left us aghast at the poverty of 
his invention. In this detail, as in all his work since 
then, he exposed the conventional qualities in his art ; 
that these should exist side by side with his undoubted 



MEN AND MANNERS 169 

brilliance is one of the curiosities of modern literature. 
Nowhere, in_all his occult hocus-pocus, was there hint of 
irony or satire ; we were asked to keep a straight face 
while the most hackneyed machinery squeaked in front of 
us. A native Egyptian medium was sent into a trance; 
nextly, table-rappings, clapping of hands, and rushing 
of winds accompanied the spirit manifestations. Again, 
the magic circle in the sand, or wherever else, was used 
for purposes of safety while the experiments proceeded. 

The only departure from the ordinary spiritualistic 
business behind a curtain, in this story, was the scene 
of it all being Egypt. The momentous seance, the vital 
episode, of the book, took place in a sandstorm; other- 
wise the trappings were of the most dismally conven- 
tional. An unpleasant Egyptian of many hundred years 
ago was entombed in the sand; over that very spot the 
magic circle was drawn. All were safe, at the critical 
moment of the experiment, save the heroine, Ida, who 
unwittingly overstepped the circle's edge. There was 
clapping of hands, a babble of words in a strange tongue, 
a stale and impure light, and then a hideous form va- 
porously took shape. As Ida approached it took on a 
hideous leer; the medium was awakened; and the old 
Egyptian was supposed to be again a straying spirit. 
Unfortunately it was in Ida that he was now straying, 
squint and all. Whereupon began the tragic battle of 
Ida for her own soul — at least, Mr. Benson would have 
had us take it tragically. 

It was always Benson tragedy, never true tragedy. 
None of the shibboleths about that scene in the desert 
moved us ; the chatter of black magic and white magic 
left us cold. The power of Henderson, whose love even- 
tually enabled him to quell the spirit that possessed Ida, 
was nothing more or less, by the author's own admission, 
than plain hypnotism. As to its pretense of the occult, 
then, " The Image in the Sand " was absolutely negli- 
gible; from the standpoint of the practical hypnotist I 



170 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

fancy it was equally deficient. I would like, on that, to 
have had the opinion of Dr. William Lee Howard. Just 
as so many sex stories by women should have been ana- 
lysed only by medical men, so " The Image in the Sand " 
should have been judged only by men of science. My 
province is only to assert that the book failed utterly to 
convince its reader; artistically it was a failure. 

Note the last scene intended to be tremendous. The 
Egyptian spirit is about to be used to coerce Ida. But 
three able-bodied men have been expecting this, and by 
sheer brute force, eventually aided by a hypodermic 
syringe, turn Ida from her spirit master. Now, in any 
scale of logic, where is the reasonableness in a novel, pur- 
porting to be a convincing story of the occult, which 
proves that, after all, with muscle and morphia you may 
defy all the spirits that roam? You see the ridiculous 
conclusion of the whole matter! 

In " Flames " — and that book was absurd enough ! — 
there was far subtler suggestion of the occult; and in 
" The Garden of Allah " there was such writing as made 
the description of the sirocco in " The Image in the 
Sand " pale and ineffectual. Unfortunately for Mr. Ben- 
son, the two last-named novels appeared in the same 
year; his art, compared to that of Mr. Hichens, was 
sadly inadequate for his literary schemes. This was typ- 
ical of the artistic futility that has ever since been Mr. 
Benson's distinctive quality. Immeasurably finer artist 
than the average woman novelist of his age, in artistic 
futility he was surpassed only by those same women. 

In his story of souls that jumped, Mr. Hichens had, as 
we have seen, blazed the way for Mr. Benson. " The 
Image in the Sand " had been about a soul th.it jumped 
from Egypt to a quotidian incarnation. His next story, 
" The Angel of Pain," gave us the tragedy of a jump- 
ing goat. Mr. Benson, it is true, pretended that it was a 
story about the Return to Nature, the Simple Life, and 



MEN AND MANNERS 171 

kindred fads that he thought would appeal to his fash- 
ionable feminine audience. 

No ; put not your faith in the simple life, in Pastor 
Wagner, Pastor Kneipp, or in Pan. That way lies a 
heavy, pungent smell, the smell of the goat, and upon 
your nonconformist breast the imprint of cloven hoofs, 
until, instead of being a pantheist, a barefoot, a simple- 
ton, or whatever the brief term for your stripe may be, 
you are nothing but a somewhat distorted corpse. You 
go to bed one fine night, out in the open, as the doctrine 
you have fashioned for yourself dictates ; you fade into 
dreams under the trees, among the birds and beasts whom 
you have managed to impress with a sense of your good- 
fellowship — and the first thing you know you are stran- 
gling, and screaming into the night this : 

" Oh, my God ! Oh, Christ ! " 

And you, having shouted, return to the gods of your 
ancestors, pass out of your pagan reaction, and out of 
every other sort of action. What your friends find, when 
they approach the hammock in which you have been sleep- 
ing the simple sleep, is merely a glimmering of a white- 
flaimeled figure, with a something black, irregular, blot- 
ting out and concealing most of the thing in the ham- 
mock. The black blot skips suddenly into the air, disap- 
pears with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds ; and you 
are found with Fear written all over your face, and with 
frightful contusions upon your breast, as if a great 
beast had danced and leaped there. It is true that be- 
fore you actually draw the last breath, the fear on your 
face fades, and there appears, instead, joy — ineffable joy. 
Ineffable, I think, is always the word. But what can we 
do with even ineffable joy when we are entirely dead? 

No ; take my word for it, based upon Mr. Benson's, 
and avoid the life that is too close to nature. Be fash- 
ionable and take up the simple life as a fad, if you like, 
quite in the manner satirised politely if somewhat heavily 
by Mr. Benson ; or be timidly suburban ; be anything you 



172 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

like in the fresh-air line, subscribing to the Fresh Air 
Fund, or the Ice Fund, or going in for any of those open- 
air processes that may be engaged in from your desk in 
town ; but beware, ah, beware greatly of the actual re- 
turn to nature! 

We have heard a good deal about that return to na- 
ture. In some places they called it the return to the land ; 
in others, the call of the wild. It meant about the same 
thing. Toyed with politely, airily — in the manner of 
Watteau and the Dresden shepherdesses, under the some- 
what stagey trees — there was no harm at all. But the 
moment you pursued the scheme to its logical conclusion 
— look out for the pungent smell, the cloven hoofs, the 
simplification that is a little too sudden and spells death ! 

That, at least, is the logical conclusion according to 
Mr. Benson. Whether it is really logical or not, is an- 
other matter. I assure you that in the whole story logic 
was as much to seek as was real tragedy. All the con- 
ventional properties were used for stage settings in this 
cheap melodrama. A great artist may take the uncanny, 
the supernatural, the grotesque, and sublimate it through 
his genius so that it makes upon us a vivid impression 
which quells our reason and our logic. But Mr. Benson 
in " The Angel of Pain " achieved nothing save the effect 
of great striving toward a confused aim. He wrote him- 
self down, finally, as a second-rate novelist, juggling, and 
juggling awkwardly, with first-class materials. The 
whole matter of Merivale and his harking back to Pan, 
and to death, what a jumble it was of half-digested 
Christianity and paganism ! The Christian dream of 
beauty conflicted and mingled with the pantheist's ; the 
phrases of the written gospels elbowed those of the old 
nude Greeks ; nowhere was there a hint that Mr. Benson 
dared originality of his own in this quest away from 
civilisation. Even to the goat legend, he used all the 
assorted shibboleths that he could find in hackneyed 
chronicles and creeds. This was the imagination of a 



MEN AND MANNERS 173 

child translating human thought into the posturings of 
marionettes. To have followed the flight into nature to 
some magnificent end might have been a splendid task for 
a great artist; to close such flight with melodrama pat- 
terned on conventional legend was confession of medi- 
ocrity. 

Only intellects of the most imitative type could have 
been impressed by " The Angel of Pain." I had almost 
written " primitive type " ; but that would have been an 
injustice. The really, unsophisticatedly primitive would 
never have harked back to any legend, whether it was as 
picturesque as Pan, or as pungent as a goat. The en- 
tire episode of Merivale's return to Pan definitely stamped 
Benson as bourgeois. He was writing the conventional 
for the conventional, decking out the accepted legends 
with a not too skilfully woven tinsel of modernity. Never 
a glimmer of originality. Pan ; the pan-pipes ; the goat- 
smell ; the patter about Christ on the cross ; Nature used 
as a " back-drop " for it all ; — what was it but one in- 
mate of intellectual Suburbia bringing to his fellow- 
burghers some feeble imitations of legends already dimly 
familiar to them? 

In but one brief page we thought to discover again 
the author of " Dodo." Where he described the dinner 
conversation at a house-party in the country there was 
a quick flash of the old fire; but even that died off into 
dull muttering; and we wonder, throughout the book, if 
this was indeed the writer who had once made such sacri- 
fices for brilliancy. 

The hackneyed was the keynote of the book. When 
the heroine first realised that she loved and was beloved, 
what was it that the reader was asked to find in her 
face? What but " the light which was never yet on sea 
or land, but only on the face of a woman " ? When the 
artist in the story was painting his great portrait of the 
heroine, did he work as all craftsmen know the others 
work? No; he looked long and dreamily; he waited for 



174 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

fine moments ; he seized them in frenzy ; he painted, in 
other words, upon the approved romantic pattern, as 
poseurs and the novel-reading public like to fashion it. 
This was what the suburban villa expected and what 
Mr. Benson always had in stock. 

He was become the novelist in ordinary to the suburban 
villa. 

I have always wondered what George Moore said to 
this novel if grim fate ever put it in his way. The 
chapters about painting, must, I think, have saddened 
his sad face still more. As for the Merivale return to 
nature — well, I assure you that with all the hocus-pocus 
about the birds that sang songs for him, and the goat 
that jumped on him, there was not one passage in all 
the hundreds of pages of that sort in this book to com- 
pare with the single passage in " Sister Teresa," where 
Ulick painted this scene for Evelyn: 

To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city, where 
men lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must 
go with her to the pure country, to the woods, and to the 
places where the invisible ones whom the Druids knew cease- 
lessly ascend and descend from earth to heaven, and heaven 
to earth, in flame-colored spirals. He told her he knew of a 
house by a lake shore, and there they might live in communion 
with nature, and in the fading lights, and in the quiet hol- 
lows of the woods she would learn more of God than she 
could in the convent. 

Moore used the Druids, used legend — oh, we admit 
that ! — but a masterful force of originality swept us on 
with him, in spite of that. In Benson nothing swept us, 
save distaste for his conventionality. " The Angel of 
Pain," with its mess of ineffective " nature-faking " and 
rank melodrama, succeeded only in one thing, in secur- 
ing for its author absolute right to the title of Bour- 
geois Benson. 



MEN AND MANNERS 175 

Just as Edgar Saltus, in America, became the victim 
of his own brilliant phrases, losing in them his reason- 
ableness, so E. F. Benson lost his brilliance in his bour- 
geoisie. 

Yet Mr. Benson had not exhausted his menagerie. To 
say nothing of what wonders he may still have in store 
for the future, he added a vampire to his already exten- 
sive collection. Or, at any rate, he meant to. He did 
his best. The public that pays its money to Mr. Ben- 
son had come to expect fearful and wonderful creatures 
from him; he did his best to supply the demand. He 
gave them the stray and squinting spirit, haloed in stale 
light, and babbling strange tongues over the African 
sands ; and he gave them the black, irregular, skipping 
goat that, masquerading as Pan, committed murder. So 
he thought to give his customers a human vampire. 

Unfortunately his courage failed him a little in that 
enterprise. Though he meant his human vampire as the 
star of his performance in " Paul," yet the result deceived 
us ; the creature in the ring was not, after all, the crea- 
ture painted on the posters. We had to accuse Mr. Ben- 
son of having used a Barnum-like deception. Still, on 
the posters was so masterly a sketch of a human vampire 
that merely to have gazed on it was almost worth the 
price of the book. Indeed, if it had not been for a host 
of such fictitious figures as Count Fosco, and the gentle- 
man described in Beatrice Harraden's " Fowler " (referred 
to earlier in my book), Mr. Benson's character of Theo- 
dore Beckwith might almost have been thought original. 
Even his name, if the Harraden hero had not been called 
Theodore Bevan, might have seemed original. But now- 
adays it is always hazardous to accuse Mr. Benson of 
originality. 

A little picked bird of a man was this Theodore, fas- 
tidious as a D'Orsay, cruel as Nero. Of puny frame, he 
had the will to live so intense in him that the mere sight 



176 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of other people's vitality was as meat and drink to him. 
A horrible humor flamed constantly in him ; a biting and 
malicious tongue did the bidding of a cruel and quick 
mind. Again, you see, the hackneyed formulas of Hugo, 
of Rigoletto, of Richard the Third, and Lord Byron ! 
Theodore's " merry, goat-like laugh " was never so hearty 
as when he was watching the agony he had bred in 
others. 

Had Mr. Benson kept his courage, this must have 
turned out a proper vampire. Vampire, and a touch of 
goat, too. . . . Ah, it might have been a sad day 
for Mr. Luther Burbank if Mr. Benson could have per- 
severed to give us a cross between a vampire and a goat. 

Our merry, goat-like Theodore had a great deal of 
money, which brought him all he wanted, including the 
lovely Norah. Having married her, he alternately tor- 
mented her, and lived upon her lusty vitality. When her 
hatred for him was firmly established, he took for secre- 
tary one Paul, a boy-and-girl friend of Norah's, and be- 
gan to feast on that youth's exuberant vitality also. Ob- 
serving Paul and Norah relapsing into quite innocent 
companionship, our vampire determines to feed his malice 
by driving them as dangerously together as possible ; to 
enact, in brief, in his own household, the part of " El 
Gran Galeoto." 

Observe, finally, for proof of Mr. Benson's inability to 
escape from the thrall of the pseudo-supernatural and 
the melodramatic, the star scene in " Paul." 

Paul and Norah dancing together was the sight that 
of all sights in the world appealed most to the vampire 
in Theodore. As these two fine young creatures glowed 
in the exhilaration of the dance; as their beauty quick- 
ened with the awakening of that love for each other 
which unconsciously filled them ; as their combined vital- 
ity waxed and burned with an almost visible flame — Theo- 
dore is pictured as watching and watching and drawing 
it all in in huge gulps of delight. He determined to take, 



MEN AND MANNERS 177 

of that delight, one gulp greater than all the others. 
He decked out Paul and Norah as if for a costume ball ; 
he had them surely waltz into consciousness of how much 
they loved each other while he, who had arranged the 
whole fantastic scene — the costumes, the seclusion — sat 
at a pianola and supplied the music. Picture it, will you ! 
Two fancy-dress-ball partners waltzing; the little vam- 
pire at the pianola, sucking in their vitality, knowing he 
is leading them to the jaws of destruction, and hoping, 
indeed, that they will pass the gate! 

One must do Mr. Benson this much justice: that was 
one of the finest arrangements in vampires and pianolas 
to be found anywhere ! 

After that descent into the unintentionally ridiculous, 
Mr. Benson, as usual, leaped into melodrama ; the process 
was exactly that of the novels which preceded " Paul." 
He made Paul kill Theodore by way of a motor-car, and 
then tried to interest us in Paul's remorse. That was a 
lamentable anti-climax ; it was consistent only in complet- 
ing what has evidently become the routine of his con- 
ventionality as a novelist. The absurd ; the melodramatic, 
and then the anti-climax ; that is the stuff in which the 
once brilliant Mr. Benson now works ; that is the stuff 
that choked the artist in him. 

To surpass the pianola scene was impossible, even for 
Mr. Benson; he had to kill the vampire; there was noth- 
ing else to do. Though we had seen an Egyptian spirit 
squinting from the eyes of an English girl; though we 
had seen Pan resenting Merivale's impertinent approach 
and murdering him, goat-wise; we were not to see Theo- 
dore in the very act of fattening, vampirically, from 
Paul's vitality, while Paul visibly became a shadow of 
himself. No ; splendid as was his skill on the pianola, 
Theodore remained a vampire manque. The show did 
not, after all, come up to the posters. 

The best one could say of " Paul " was that it was 
the sort of menagerial entertainment to which Mr. Ben- 



178 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

son had educated his public. Nor did " The Climber " 
attest any progress in art. 

Considered critically, Mr. Benson's career had reached 
its fixed formula of hopelessness long before this. The 
only thing left was wonder as to what absurdities he 
might still indulge in. 

Artistically he had ceased to exist. 



CHAPTER THREE 

The curious case of " Dodo " Benson led to this con- 
clusion, among others : 

The average second-rate novelist in England is about 
as good a workman as our American first-raters. 

Mr. Benson, from brilliant beginnings, and though 
struggling constantly toward larger things, declined into 
an artist of the second rate. Yet as craftsman, as ma- 
nipulator of prose, he was always the equal of the lead- 
ing American novelists of society. His devotion to so- 
ciety, his efforts to incorporate in his books the many 
changing fads and follies of society, combined with his 
intention to please, at all risks, a suburbanly minded pub- 
lic, were what ruined Mr. Benson. His ruin should have 
its lesson for our coming social historians on this side 
of the Atlantic ; just as from his prose they may still 
learn something. 

To name all the English second-raters who approached 
social history in fiction would be a weariness to our pa- 
tience; and but slight help to my argument. Percy 
White, Richard Bagot and W. E. Norris were all good 
workmen in that vineyard; the latter, especially, was a 
far finer writer than the author of the American " best 
seller " mostly is — and a novelist, indeed, insufficiently 
appreciated — but I have no space to give them. 

If this were not a book with a distinct and single aim, 
namely, to point out what seems to me the matter with 
American fiction, there are plenty of pleasant English 
reminiscences we might indulge in. There was delightful 
entertainment in Hewlett and Harland, those Anglo- 
179 



180 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Saxons with the souls of Latins ; in the sturdy shocks 
which Kipling gave us — and many other charming experi- 
ences came even to the sourest critic. 

Kipling, particularly, we must not mention here ; he 
would greatly spoil our argument. The example of this 
glorified and glorifying journalist, whose genius turned 
journalism into the most powerful literature of our time, 
would have exactly the wrong effect if cited for Amer- 
ican following. What we must pray for is not facility 
in production, fluent ease in reporting life, mere surface 
glitter, or that most fatal of the gifts of the gods, clever- 
ness ; we have all those in plenty and to spare ; what we 
need is deeper concern for the art of literature inter- 
preted as finely as possible. Greater care for the man- 
ner of our writing is what we need. The matter will 
take care of itself. 

Would our professors in favor of our trying always 
for a " bumper crop " of literature pretend for a mo- 
ment that there was any likelihood of America's literary 
material going the way of its buffaloes and its forests? 
No ; in a continent such as ours, there is no fear of that. 
What there is great danger of, however, is that for the 
bulk of what is written you will be able to see no litera- 
ture. Already we recruit our so-called literature from 
the ranks of the most newly notorious, whether they have 
committed murder, compiled millions, or exchanged White 
House burdens for the heart of Africa. 

But I stray too far along this by-path ; it takes me 
to the main causes in my plea ; and those causes are to 
be dealt with at greater length later in this book. What 
I wished, in beginning this present digression, to point 
out, was that even where this or that writer helped my 
argument, it was not always possible to include him. 
Sometimes the writer's work was neither sufficiently bad 
nor sufficiently good; sometimes, again, there was already 
plenty of critical stuff in existence about him. I have 
tried to choose onlv the extreme cases, to show how high 



MEN AND MANNERS 181 

or how low our fiction ranged, and to pay critical atten- 
tion to writers who have not received it elsewhere. 

Throughout, too, you must remember, mine has been 
the principle of spontaneous selection. Because these are 
instanced, is no reason to suppose others slighted. The 
line must be drawn somewhere ; unless, like the novelists 
of the Mudie's Library period in Victorian literature, I 
had three volumes to move in. My line has been drawn 
entirely at behest of personal fancy. For my not men- 
tioning your favorite, Sir, or yours, Madame, there is no 
reason at all; and they may be just as great favorites 
with me as with you. If I have not scourged your par- 
ticularly pet aversion, that is no proof that I do not 
hate it as heartily as you. In reassembling my critical 
memories, some crowded forward, that is all; I took the 
clearest of them, those that appealed most to me as suf- 
ficient for my argument. 

Do not, then, blame me for saying nothing about 
Morley Roberts's delightful " The Idlers," or about 
" Broke of Covenden," or " Araminta," or about a score 
of other valuable pictures of social life as it is to-day. 
I am as alive to their qualities as you; but the scheme 
of my book is already, like the French omnibus, Complet; 
I have room for just so many literary passengers. 

To take on those others who hail me from the corners 
of memory — well, that is matter for another book. 

Before I come to the somewhat pompously meticu- 
lous efforts made by American historians of society, I 
would preface what I may say about them with the obser- 
vation that if I hold them too lightly, it is because I 
have always in mind John Galsworthy's " The Country 
House " as a masterpiece in that sort. To expect such 
work on our side of the water, where neither life itself 
nor literature has yet reached such polish, is perhaps un- 
fair. But there, none the less, is the high standard de- 
fined for us ; when we can write like that, can exchange 



182 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

for that fine human, philosophic outlook the awkward 
angularities of our prevalent dilettante attitudes — then 
indeed will we have triumphed over the ladies and the 
critics. 

Aside from the detail of the greater finish in the life 
Galsworthy describes, the evolution of his art has shown 
such change and progress as any American artist might 
experience. His first books were by no means remark- 
able. It was not until he wrote " The Country House " 
that he found himself. There is no reason why an Amer- 
ican, seeking only the development of his art, rather than 
the demands of the writing trade, should not rise sim- 
ilarly superior to convention. 

Such a picture as John Galsworthy's " The Country 
House " is a piece of painting which must endure, be- 
cause it vitalises a type, an entire way of living, a milieu, 
that is as much a part of the history of the English 
people as anything in the reports of Parliament. 

If one has given way at all to the notion that the 
English were in but scant possession of either humor or 
finesse, it becomes time, in face of such a book as this, 
to readjust one's view. If we were wont to murmur, 
while whimsically or furtively dandling something in 
yellow covers, that " they do these things so much bet- 
ter in France," we no longer, as far as English fiction 
is concerned, have excuse for that murmur. Certain do- 
mains are no longer exclusively French preserves. The 
example of France in artistic finesse, in care for the mere 
art of literature, is still high enough to fill America with 
shame ; but English art has encroached on one French 
preserve after another. 

Nothing in French art is finer than the Galsworthy 
satire on that bulwark of England's national life, the 
country gentleman. So fine is that art, that I find my- 
self in exactly the case of those American newspapers who 
spill all their eulogistic adjectives daily. I find myself 
able to declare, simply, but definitely, that this, is the 



MEN AND MANNERS 183 

finest picture of the life in an English county family 
that our literature holds. No Trollope, no Jane Austen, 
no Thackeray even, has done the thing better than that. 
It is nothing less than a national document. Mr. Gals- 
worthy has still much of his career before him; if I do 
not analyse his one fine book now, it is because he may 
go yet farther in his art ; besides, that art defies critical 
analysis. It is easy enough to say that whether in " The 
Country House " or " Fraternity " he works almost with- 
out a plot, that he is always painting character, char- 
acter, and nothing but character; that he sketches types 
so faithfully that we know them as redolent of Eng- 
land's actual breath and being; — all this does not hint 
the charm his art exerts. There is much more than char- 
acter drawing, than satire ; there is, for one thing, the 
large irony that is in all great human affairs. Here is 
an England, painted by an Englishman, that has all the 
sharp outline a foreigner might have given the picture, 
and yet, behind the keen edge of satire is the hand of one 
who loves his country and would not see it topple from 
the dangerous height that men call Complacency. 

Before I admit, once and for all, my inability suffi- 
ciently to appraise " The Country House " or " A Com- 
mentary," I would point out another such picture, but 
little below those in art, that marks equally the distance 
between the first-raters in England and those in America, 
and, so doing, emphasises the debt we owe those who 
have made our literature what it is. This was Richard 
Pryce's " The Successor." 

Abrim with humor, and sparkling with gems of char- 
acterisation, this book used the art of suggestion more 
delicately than any other English novel in the last 25 
years. Joined with keen insight into the life and con- 
duct of a great English country estate, was a shrewd 
undercurrent of plot that was little less than Balzacian. 
One did not know which to admire the more: the skill 



184 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

with which the entire household of Alton was depicted ; 
the wonderful portrait, as by Daumier or Leandre, of the 
mistress in that great house ; or the subtlety with which, 
at the back of all, was outlived the mysterious incident 
which enabled that mistress to achieve for her great house 
an heir. 

Simple enough, in essentials, was the story, and im- 
possible to be hinted, since, as in all the finest stories, it 
is only the telling that matters. Simple as it was, thin 
as the theme seemed, the reader was constantly kept alert 
by Mr. Pryce's subtle fancy, his shrewd humor, and his 
keen insight into intelligences both fine and dull. If the 
book had held nothing but the portrait of Lady Alton 
it would still have been worth a dozen or so of our Amer- 
ican " best sellers." The pains she took to be aristo- 
cratic; the phrases with which she occasionally betrayed 
her unaristocratic origin ; the way she bore herself to- 
ward the old family servant, Balderton, now conciliating 
her, now fearful of her; — all this combination of make- 
believe lady with the morals of a brood-mare was painted 
so sharply as to make a memorable picture in the gallery 
over which Emma Bovary presides. 

If, when her exalted position still sat newly on her, 
the mistress of this great house had still some betray- 
ing turns of speech, as " like I do," or " Anner " instead 
Of " Anna," or if she " laid " on the sofa, time taught 
her to drop those easy peccadilloes ; yet there were cer- 
tain other tricks of speech she never lost. She always 
said of fruit, for instance, that it was " beautiful and 
ripe," only a shade less dreadful than her housemaids who 
said " beautifully and ripe " ; she declared of a dog that 
it fared "sumptuously"; and she gave herself away, to 
put it vulgarly, every day, in such little lapses as in Eng- 
land mark the line between those to the manor born and 
those who have entered the manor by way of the stock 
exchange or the brewery. Here, on our side of the water, 
where the language is equally abused by those who ought 



MEN AND MANNERS 18S 

to know better and those who never will, such distinc- 
tions in English speech would by no means determine 
social position. 

To that whole question, however, of the speech spoken 
in America, and the English used as dialogue in some of 
our novels, I mean to devote a later chapter. My exami- 
nation into that detail will disclose one of the strongest 
proofs of my contention, that our literature and our cul- 
ture are rank with weeds. 

While the dialogue in " The Successor " was a model 
which our domestic vendors of talk might profitably 
study, it was the characterisation, and the running philo- 
sophic comment of our novelist, that made the book one 
to commend as an example of what can be done in pic- 
turing society in the twentieth century. The best of Eng- 
lish and French methods in fiction were combined in this 
story. 

I wish American methods were up to such an achieve- 
ment. 

Unfortunately, the only American up to that was an 
expatriate — Henry James. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

Before we consider Henry James, however, we must, 
in order to show how far behind the imported lags the 
domestic article, give some slight review to the work of 
Robert W. Chambers, Winston Churchill and David 
Graham Phillips. 

Mr. Chambers always seemed the most finished artist 
of the three. He knows the craft of writing; in virtu- 
osity he is one whose books show many admirable tricks ; 
he has, unfortunately, some of the lightness that comes 
with facility. Mr. Hamlin Garland's use of the word 
sincerity has made me avoid it whenever possible; yet in 
the case of Mr. Chambers one is not infrequently re- 
minded of the soulful sigh with which Mr. Garland is once 
said to have greeted Richard Harding Davis : " Ah, — ■ 
why don't you dig deeper? " Mr. Chambers might be the 
better for greater depth in his work. 

His earlier work had no bearing on the present subject; 
it was sheerly romantic, invariably well done, but afforded 
the social historian no clue. In such a social picture as 
" The Younger Set " he proved his intention to enter the 
field against Hichens and the other Englishmen. Yet 
neither that book nor others he produced in that cate- 
gory deserve mention, as fashionable chronicles, in the 
same breath with " The Londoners," or even the Morley 
Roberts stories, " The Idlers " and " Lady Penelope," 
though that was evidently the vein they attempted. 

Partly, perhaps, the failure came from the still in- 
choate condition of that society which Mr. Chambers 
tried to depict. Mr. James has assured us that a society 
must be old before it becomes critical ; perhaps we might, 
in mercy to Mr. Chambers, twist that into the assertion 
that until a society is old it is impossible to criticise it. 
186 



MEN AND MANNERS 187 

For my part, I think Mr. Chambers' method tended 
toward the failure, as works of art, of such stories as 
"The Younger Set" and "The Firing Line." He 
seemed determined to get New York society into his fic- 
tion by insisting on the little things. If the proper fash- 
ionable air could be photographed rather than painted ; if 
a picture of a period, and of a manner of living and 
thinking, could be given in strokes so careful that each 
one seemed to say : " This is the way they spend their 
hours ; they have just learned how, and I have also just 
learned how, and I am going to put it all down, before I 
forget, and before we all try to learn some other social 
game ! " then these stories did it. Personally, I do not 
think the thing can be done like that. When you pains- 
takingly photograph a detail, you may still give but a 
blurred impression of the whole. 

Still, having made up his mind to that method, Mr. 
Chambers certainly worked earnestly and laboriously. 
He noted even more than seemed humanly possible of the 
American effort to make fashionable the mingled town- 
house and country-house life of the English. Yet what 
he actually achieved was as paltry as the whole social 
milieu that engaged him. You had only, by contrast, to 
read Galsworthy to see wherein both Mr. Chambers's mat- 
ter and manner were insignificant. 

The changing tides and currents in New York fash- 
ionable life as we see it to-day are what engage Mr. 
Chambers when he is most serious. Often enough, he is 
only flippant, for purposes of profitable pot-boiling; it 
is so easy for him to write well, that he writes far too 
much; he is one of the most conspicuous victims of those 
commercial conditions in American literature which so 
deserve rebuke. When he is in earnest, his pictures, too 
labored though they are, are valuable. In those books 
the novelist painted the existing social sets as foul with 
corruption ; he described the physical and mental degen- 
eration of the now dominant generation ; and he re- 



188 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ported picturesquely the divorce storm that so repeatedly 
tears through the most conspicuous avenues of fashion. 
It was in the younger set that he found hope for the 
future ; he held that salvation for our society lies in 
those who are growing up as its. younger members. 

He differed, in that conclusion, from other authorities. 
David Graham Phillips, for instance, began his novel, 
" The Second Generation," on exactly the opposite 
theory, namely, that our youngers, expensively educated 
by the money earned in a generation of toil, are prone to 
degenerate into sluggards and snobs. Mr. Phillips, it is 
true, meant America ; Mr. Chambers meant New York. 
It was an interesting contrast in points of view, even as 
the mere art of the two writers also affords illumination 
to the analyst. It would be possible, perhaps, to find 
both these theories about American society right; it is 
often the second generation which, issuing from the great 
body of the country, degenerates, in New York, into that 
breed which sociologists find rotten and the salvation of 
which lies in its children. 

It is rather in what he may yet do, than in what he 
has done, that Robert Chambers is to be reckoned with 
as a novelist of society. If he can forget the commercial 
lures of publishers and public ; if he can consider our 
society critically without being too much fascinated by 
the personal attractions it offers, he may some day write 
the book that will accord with his abilities in the mere 
technics of his art. 

Aside from the difference of opinion already noted, no 
greater contrast can be imagined than exists between the 
work of Mr. Chambers and Mr. David Graham Phillips. 
The former does not know how to write badly ; the latter 
learns but slowly how not to write ill. The former takes 
few things seriously; the latter is nothing if not in 
earnest, 



MEN AND MANNERS 189 

Through story after story Mr. Phillips was nothing 
save a lecturer who used the verbiage of journalism. His 
documents and his parables appeared in books, instead 
of in newspapers; otherwise there was little difference. 
Now it was corruption in our politics, now in our insur- 
ance, that engaged him; but never were we so conscious 
of reading a novel as of being dragged through unpleas- 
ant facts, and amid unpleasant persons, by a lecturer 
who, though doubtless instructive, had no great charm 
of manner. 

At a time when a host of other writers were reminding 
us of our political rottenness, Mr. Phillips joined the 
chorus with a story called " The Plum Tree." Corrup- 
tion in cities and States had been marshaled for us by 
Lincoln Steffens, Josiah Flynt, Winston Churchill, and 
even A. H. Lewis. Though posed as a novel, " The Plum 
Tree " was nothing but a plain document upon political 
conduct in America. Plain, not to say commonplace. 
The subject, in this book as in many similar ones by the 
same author, subdued to its own level the literary man- 
ner of its would-be chronicler in fiction. 

Just as in the political story we had never been told 
anything new, so in his story about insurance nothing 
that he instanced of unscrupulousness and dishonesty was 
great news to us. He marshaled, in " Light-Fingered 
Gentry," many notorious facts, many obvious indecencies 
toward the insuring public ; he made fairly vivid the com- 
plete lawlessness with which the robber barons in that 
special field of finance manipulated to themselves the 
greatest possible spoils, to the public the lightest possi- 
ble pound of flesh ; yet there was nothing in the book 
that readers of newspapers did not know before, or that 
differed in any essential from the journalese jargon in 
which our newspapers are mostly written. The author's 
style, in that book, was as loose, as light-fingered, as the 
morals of any of his most blackly painted rogues. It 



190 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was an example to weary us anew, for the hundredth 
time, of the so-called novel with a purpose. The purpose 
so seldom permits of art ! 

Save in the detail of reaching a different audience, 
these novels are exactly on the newspaper level. One 
could not imagine even the most careless reader, de- 
bauched by the cheap journalistic colloquialisms and cor- 
rupt phraseologies, finding in them any page or sentence 
that he could not have found as well written in his favor- 
ite newspaper. Both books were rank with useless and 
tautologic verbiage. 

You have seen what were the early faults of this writer. 
Nothing in all of his previous writing-with-a-purpose had 
prepared us for the virtues in his " Old Wives for New." 
There, for the first time, we were able to forget the man's 
manner, and find praise for the courage that had enabled 
him to triumph over it. There, finally, he wrote the book 
that ranked him among the social historians to whom 
American literature must look. 

Taking this case as example, the American novelist 
must needs have written at least ten novels, more or less 
successful, before he finds it safe to describe men and 
women as they are. Until, in other words, by an incon- 
trovertible ledger of achievement — reducible to terms of 
the number of copies sold, of profits amassed — the novel- 
ist has the whiphand over both publishers and public, he 
lacks, in America, courage to issue from the ranks of 
those who merely supply demands. The demand varies. 
Now it is the pretty-pretty; now it is the sexual; again 
it. is the laying bare of public abuses. 

In " Old Wives for New " Mr. Phillips found a fortu- 
nate mean between the two extremes that had marked 
our fiction. Either we had life described as a perfumed 
fairy tale, or else as a sink of salacity. If our novels 
had been spineless, merely somewhat intricate decorations 
on the subject of life, rather than pictures of life itself, 



MEN AND MANNERS 191 

this book was proof of courage and path-breaking, while 
jet it avoided those perils of suggestiveness which had 
been so eagerly sought by so many ladies. 

The story, as story, was old enough. A wife is de- 
picted as part glutton, part mollusc and part malade 
imaginaire, lapsing from her youth's first fresh charm 
into sloth, fat, and querulousness. The husband retains 
his youth, its vigors and vanities. An old story, you 
see; but here vividly presented in terms of the immedi- 
ate and familiar. Eventually the husband is definitely 
alienated; finds love elsewhere; and the story closes with 
both the original partners divorced, and otherwise mated. 
A very old story indeed. We might easily say that in 
Moliere, in Balzac, or even in Bourget, we found such 
plots more perfectly elaborated; or that our newspaper 
gave us just such a story any day of any week. True; 
but everything, in a novel, depends on the sum total of 
impression given. That total was distinctly valuable in 
this case. 

The sex-problem, and the characters posed for us, were 
vital and actual. Everything, for the first time in this 
novelist's career, made for really immediate and vivid so- 
cial history. Something of the mid-continental heart of 
the country was in the story ; something, also, of that 
New York which glitters its surface charm upon the 
negative of cosmopolitan appreciation. Since the early 
novels of the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, there had 
not been better pages about the fleeting phases of New 
York. Many more or less notorious places of public re- 
sort were used as scenes for those parts of the story 
wherein New York exerts, upon the male characters in it, 
a fascination comparable to that of Paris in Charpen- 
tier's " Louise." Even a well-remembered actual episode — 
of the millionaire viveur who was shot while in his inamo- 
rata's flat and taken hence, though stark in death, in a 
carriage to his own house, where his death from actual 
causes was eventually announced — was used by Mr. 



192 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Phillips effectively. He was still the special correspond- 
ent, still the reporter; but he gave distinct signs of be- 
coming a novelist. Before this he had never been other 
than the newspaper man or the preacher. 

What was most encouraging in " Old Wives for New " 
was the dominant note of broad intelligence on which the 
author treated such eternal questions as home, love, and 
divorce. He permitted " no nonsense " about religion, 
about duty, or all the old shibboleths for conventional 
minds, to deflect his rigid reasoning. His hero's wife, by 
her untidiness, her uncleanliness, had set an impassable 
gulf between herself and him; he turned from that, on to 
a path of his own. He still, if he could not change or 
help her life, had his own to live. He fulfilled the selfish 
demands of the Ego ; his was the doctrine of millions of 
unconscious Nietzschians. 

It was by his sketch of the slatternly wife that Mr. 
Phillips most completely proved his emancipation from 
the ranks of the Great Unsexed. The influence of woman 
on our literature was for either too much of shame or too 
little. Our novelists had either to attempt such reckless 
suggestiveness as only women are expert in, or else to 
conform to all the petty foot rules of provincialism and 
conventional morality that the other sort of American 
woman applies. It took courage to so pay his respects 
to " the sex " as he did in that slattern's sketch ; it 
showed that, for once, an American novelist had chosen 
to forget that only women read American books, and 
that if you offend American women you are in danger of 
your literary life. He showed his married heroine's de- 
cline into unsightly fat ; her abstention from water ; he 
told of her hair's unpleasant odor; of her stuffing herself 
with rich food, and then complaining of illness ; he showed 
her pleading housewifely duties in all emergencies, and 
yet never doing a mortal thing other than stuffing her 
stomach or taking naps. We had to chuckle in delight 
over the lecture her doctor gave her. Inasmuch as it so 



MEN AND MANNERS 193 

clearly outlines the text on which much in the book was 
devised, let me quote a little from that lecture : 

These stupid, unthinking writers, pandering to the stupid, 
unthinking public! Plays and novels and poems about the 
petty, unreal, essentially ridiculous violations of man's silly 
little conventionalities of law and morals, when the real 
" strong situations," the real tragedies, all center about the 
immutable laws of the universe. He that sins against con- 
ventional morals can laugh, if he is strong enough to shrug 
at public opinion. But health — that determines life and hap- 
piness and love and friends and food, clothing, shelter — the 
soul that sinneth against health, it must die! . . . Poor 
woman! Driveling about duty, when she'd better have been 
worrying about weight ! If the girth had stayed right, there'd 
have been no need to appeal to the policeman duty. Poor 
woman ! Ignorance ! Ignorance and vanity — and superstition ! 

Whether this slattern was typical or exceptional, no 
American had before this attempted her. She was drawn 
as of the Middle West; if she is a possibility there in 
well-to-do circumstances, what may not be said of the 
Southerners who to actual aversion to water joined lack 
in luxurious surroundings? By this, and other details 
in his book, Mr. Phillips may have started the reproach 
that his book was written to defend male transgressions 
of the marriage convention ; but in any other than petty 
philosophy he went far toward proving that the laws of 
hygiene are as vital as the laws of absolute morality. 

Only one other American book saw life larger than 
mere creeds and conventions would make it, and to that 
we have already referred, namely, " The Road to Da- 
mascus." That was finer art than Mr. Phillips's ; but if 
his book did nothing else than remind the critic of " The 
Road to Damascus " it deserves applause. In both these 
books there was plenty of stuff to stir up the little-moral- 
ity-animals in many a house that calls itself puritan. If 



194 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

in the old physician's doctrines in the Phillips book there 
was plenty of Nietzsche, there was yet more in the story 
about Richarda, and about co-education. If the slattern 
in " Old Wives for New " left one full of disgust and 
pity, that wonderful, loveliest and most intelligent of 
heroines, Richarda, in the other book, restored the bal- 
ance. 

We have so much amateurish rubbish shot at us — so 
much stuff written to prove, apparently, that you can 
write without thinking — that it was vast relief to find 
writers who knew life in the large, who, accepting our 
modern conventions, yet posed problems going far beyond 
convention, into the wide space of humanity. The taste 
in " The Road to Damascus " was truer ; the dialogue 
more telling; the philosophy saner and sweeter; above all, 
the art of the narrative and the characterisation was 
finer; yet it is possible to think of the two books, by 
Mr. Phillips and by H. A. Mitchell Keays, together. I 
can pay Mr. Phillips no greater compliment than that. 
You will have seen, in an earlier chapter, where I rank 
" The Road to Damascus." It was at least one book by 
an American woman that mitigated a little the crimes 
against literary art committed by the sex in general. 

Even so, " Old Wives for New " went far to atone for 
much slipshod and merely reportorial or sermonising writ- 
ing that Mr. Phillips had done ; it marked him as a writer 
who might possibly become valuable. His " Joshua 
Craig," written since then, was disappointing; yet one 
disappointment should not make us lose hope. 

Although Mr. Winston Churchill has never yet issued 
from the ranks of the reformers, such large and genuine 
earnestness has always informed his novels, that it is 
impossible not to take him seriously. His taking of pains, 
on the Carlylean formula, has amounted to something 
like genius. Though the critic might approach his work 
from the standpoint of mere art, it was impossible not to 



MEN AND MANNERS 195 

be impressed by the depth and seriousness of his concern 
for the political and moral humanities of his country. 

From one large, sober canvas, Mr. Churchill passed to 
another ; he took his time ; he deserved the careful appre- 
ciation of the critic in that he never rushed into the 
market with pot-boilers because pot-boilers were in de- 
mand. His pen ranged in description of first this part 
of our country, then another; period after period in our 
history engaged him. To enumerate the many fine scenes 
and characters he offered, in recent years, to those 
readers who loved the " historical novel," would be use- 
less now. 

Finally, Mr. Churchill deserved attention by being one 
of our few novelists to do things as well as he described 
them. It is not so long ago since he was running for 
Governor of his State, and it becomes yearly more and 
more evident that his desire to better the public life about 
him has its roots in something else than possible profit 
from royalties. In actual statecraft he may yet rank 
with his English namesake. If success in politics, how- 
ever, meant, in his case, cessation of his career as novel- 
ist, we might heartily wish him to be continuously unsuc- 
cessful in serving his commonwealth. There is always, 
to be sure, the example of Disraeli, to prove that the 
same man can be brilliant both in fiction and politics. 

One need go no farther than " Mr. Crewe's Career " 
to judge Mr. Churchill in even the hastiest way; he had 
done nothing better. It is true that in the earlier story 
of that same series, " Coniston," he prepared us for real- 
isation of how deeply he had studied the gulf between 
our theory of popular government and the actual prac- 
tice of it. But " Coniston " was carefully dated into the 
past ; " Mr. Crewe's Career " was of the immediate mo- 
ment. 

That Mr. Churchill had learned much from his own po- 
litical campaigns was made clear. The story showed 
keenly what is the matter with some of our New England 



196 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

States. In picture after picture of the political organ- 
isation dominating that hill-country, the novelist revealed, 
with fine literary art, what all whose eyes were not 
blinded by phrases or by money-greed had long realised, 
namely, that it is government by corporation which ac- 
tually exists, however much we may pretend that the bal- 
lot and majority rule have anything to do with it. There 
was nothing more sickening for an American, to whom 
patriotism means something more than being boisterous 
on the Fourth of July, than admission of the lamentable 
truth in much Mr. Churchill recorded. We knew well 
enough the State of which he wrote; it was the same 
State of which he had wished to be governor. " Sour 
grapes " is the last phrase you should fling at this 
writer; he impresses you as far too honest to be swerved, 
as novelist, by anything that might happen to him per- 
sonally. Yet his personal campaigns added notably to 
his store of knowledge about the people and their gov- 
ernment. We knew well enough, too, that great railroad 
monopoly which he showed as the supreme arbiter of 
men's fortunes in that region. 

That corporation had arrogated to itself all the wheels 
of the political machinery, until, at the period of this 
novel, we saw it ruthlessly dominant. It had its political 
army, well trained, and well paid. Time and again, in 
many a scene vivid with character and humor, we saw the 
hotel where all the manoeuvres were arranged ; we saw the 
room where the henchmen sat, where the entire govern- 
ment of the great state was cut and dried; and we saw 
the huge farce of conventions pretending to be free 
expressions of the People, while actually but screens for 
the autocracy of great corporations. Page on page was 
rich in caricature of shrewd lobbyists, of country politi- 
cians, and of unscrupulous financiers. 

The reader's ire was effectively aroused at the spec- 
tacle of a railroad president sitting in a New York of- 
fice and running a New England State as completely 



MEN AND MANNERS 197 

as he ran his own traffic department. It was true that 
such reader, if sophisticated, need not — mindful of an 
even grimmer sight, that of a Rhode Island Senator who 
once ran the whole United States — have been vastly sur- 
prised at any of Mr. Churchill's sketches of the game 
of politics as played in a mountain land ; but he had to 
admit the vivid manner of the presentment, and feel 
sympathy for such persons in the story as were fighting 
the good fight, for reform, for decent government, and 
for destruction of the old government by corporation and 
by lobby. We knew well enough, as I have said, that 
great corporation which was shown in this book as spend- 
ing all its money in running a State, holding that to be 
cheaper than observing the laws of life and safety; for 
years that corporation had committed murder at grade 
crossings, and had never improved either its manners 
or its roadbed save at the point of the public's pistol. 

(I have always wondered if Mr. Charles Mellen's opinion 
of " Mr. Crewe's Career " was by any chance fit for pub- 
lication. An enterprising reporter, I should think, might 
have enjoyed a brilliant quarter of an hour by engaging 
the Shore Line Emperor in conversation on that subject 
when the novel was still new. He might have asked, 
among other things, if the New London grade-crossing, 
where Dr. Appleton's wife was killed some years ago, is 
still the same old death-trap ; and could have followed 
that up, in the fine inconsequential manner of the profes- 
sional interviewer, by asking if Mr. Mellen believed, with 
Mr. Churchill, that running a legislature was cheaper than 
running a railroad on civilised lines.) 

If Mr. Churchill went further, in this book, in his 
closeness to nature, to the actual soil and life of our 
people than ever before, his art also showed a ripening 
in its humor. It was necessary to consider this novel in 
any reckoning made of American social chroniclers, since 
at base of all narrower society elements is the principle 
of human society in the large; and political reform, 



198 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

philosophically construed, means little other than social 
reform. The story marked a ripening in power and 
humor. 

Indeed, had there not been the larger achievement, al- 
ready pointed out, the picture of Humphrey Crewe him- 
self entitled the author to general thanks. Here, as he 
lived and breathed, was a Human Pest. A pest in so- 
ciety, in his neighborhood, and finally in politics. He 
typified the nervously active bore rather than the dull 
and passive bore of the Thackeray period. He was an 
essentially American pest. His name had been variously 
spelled in the highways and byways of popular journal- 
ism, where his presence had long been known ; sometimes 
he was called Know-it-all, sometimes Butt-in; essentially 
always the same type was meant. Mr. Churchill first 
gave him literary being in the portrait of Humphrey 
Crexoe. Whether we live in a Plaza, or on Piccadilly, in 
a Brooklyn boarding-house or Bloomsbury lodgings, we 
know the Human Pest : his name is legion ; he is of all 
ages, all complexions ; like the poor we have him always 
with us. The moneyed, sophisticated version of him has 
seldom been more sharply sketched than in " Mr. Crewe's 
Career." 

In this trio of Robert Chambers, David Graham Phil- 
lips and Winston Churchill we had, then, men who were 
trying, from differing premises and points of view, to 
hint the fundamental facts of American social life. The 
one considered the great Middle West, in its contrast 
against New York; another dealt with New England: 
another with New York and its suburban regions, geo- 
graphical and intellectual. I have chosen them as typi- 
cal of the best that was being done. It was none too 
good ; it was not better than England's second best ; 
but it was doubtless the best our conditions permitted. 

And that, precisely, is my point. Those three were 
Americans, writing of America, for that audience com- 



MEN AND MANNERS 199 

posed of women and newspapers which in America forms 
the general taste. Of distinctive literary art, aside from 
subject, there was not more, in all these three, than 
should furnish one really adequate artist in belles lettres. 
One was a sincere reporter ; another a brilliant trifler ; 
the third a painstaking reformer. The great portrayer 
of society was not there. 

He was not, indeed, anywhere in America. The only 
way America could claim such a one was by haling home 
the American who had removed himself^ as much as 
possible, from the conditions of our literary cosmos : 
Henry James. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

Upon Mr. James there can be but one verdict ; in the 
lines he has chosen, he is master. He is our only repre- 
sentative in the domain usually called belles lettres, but 
which might as well be Englished as the fine art of 
literature. 

Georg Brandes, visiting London in 1896, admitted Mr. 
James as America's only specimen in that sort; you may 
find it in his volume on " Gegenden & Menschen." 

If you consider what Mr. James has done, in the novel, 
the essay, and in every sort of criticism; and consider, 
also, the art of his doing it ; you will find few Americans 
to come near him. 

For the first time, in this review of mine, I am able 
to voice my appreciation of a novelist, who was many 
other things besides. He has illumined for us, better 
than any other writer, all those provinces of international 
social comparison in which Americans have had place. 

He has stood, in the manner even more than the mat- 
ter, alone. 

It was a splendid isolation Mr. James kept. His de- 
votion to manner and manners was a singular relief from 
that type of letters represented by the materially no- 
torious personage of a moment who, for no better reason 
than that an editor or publisher has offered a bribe, 
breaks into prose as blithely as a bull into a china-shop. 
The bull's business in life, we know, is by no means a 
matter of walking on eggs ; the notorious personage's 
business has more often been dollars or divorce, rather 
than finesses of grammar and syntax. These persons, 
having been asked, never doubt they can " write." In 
the sense that nine out of ten so-called business men do 
200 



MEN AND MANNERS 201 

dictate to their secretaries letters that go through the 
mails (even though no English merchant of twenty-five 
years ago would have let such linguistic abortions leave 
his office), one may admit that they can "write." But 
one thing they can never do, whether they have won to 
eminence — and the grace of publishers — by way of the 
stage, or of scandal, or of accumulated millions, they 
can never " write " as Henry James writes. 

For which, you may say, they should thank their stars. 
Perhaps ; it remains, as always, a question of taste. The 
finer taste, I assert, is with Mr. James. The master of 
prose rarely conceives himself fitted to pose, casually, 
as a master of steel, or oil, or politics. Yet any and all 
of those have time and again thought that English prose 
was a trick they could learn while they watched the tape- 
ticker. 

Long ago we heard the opinion that Tantalus, doomed 
to revisit earth and its tortures, would infinitely prefer 
the eagle pecking at his vitals to the everlasting with- 
drawal of hopes so illusively painted as in the majority of 
Mr. James's stories. The substance of those criticisms 
was that nothing climactical was ever allowed to happen ; 
that everything was an analysis of motives for doing 
things which were never described; and finally, that the 
door to the real location of the word " Finis " was in- 
variably, though suavely, shut in the reader's face. Those 
objections never succeeded in moving Mr. James from his 
allegiance to the ideals of his art. His manner of pre- 
supposing an instinctive eye to the artistic, and the 
quietistic, in his readers, has never faltered ; he has never, 
in that respect, ceased most delicately presuming that 
in America there existed a modicum of intelligent 
people. 

It is true, that until you came to examine the woof 
of his product very closely, you could fancy in his stories 
all the essentials save the most important; compression, 
ingenuity, form, style, — but hardly any action at all. 



202 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

This was especially so in his earlier and shorter stories, 
of which there are a goodly number of volumes. Reading 
even those stories, however, you had to admit that in the 
sketching of character, in the understanding of the subtle- 
ties of the modern temper as found in the higher airs of 
civilisation, Mr. James had no equal, and that in the 
artistic analysis of mental episodes, he excelled all his 
contemporaries. Even those who railed at his denational- 
isation, and refused to read a man who " satirises his 
own country," had to allow that there was no other 
American possessed of so much sheer art. 

He was always, in every fine and large sense of the 
words, a Man of Letters. 

Most deserved was that criticism on his earlier fiction 
which accused him of over-emphasising the " shop " of 
the arts. After the days of " Daisy Miller " came a 
period when all his exquisite skill was employed exclu- 
sively upon the difficult problems of the finer life. He 
exhausted the elusive decorativeness of drawing-room life. 
His vision for the delicate, elaborate complexity of social 
intercourse became keener year by year. His were prob- 
lems such as never occur to the men and women engaged 
in the life-draining pursuit of mere living; they beset 
the minds only of those whom fortune has favored to the 
point where the small finesses of existence become affairs 
as important as, in other walks of life, are the struggles 
to make both ends meet. It was the difference between 
the skilled dancers who dispute over a curve, and the 
children who are learning to walk. 

That he did write too much " shop " at one time, there 
can be no denying. I recall that in the volume called 
" The Real Thing," for instance, one story was about 
an artist and his model; one was about a dramatist; and 
the remaining two were about literature. From the point 
of view of those who like muscle in their literature, the 



MEN AND MANNERS 203 

old objections were here more valid than ever; no one 
seemed to do anything in particular. Yet the quality 
of the author's art was maintained with almost annoy- 
ing persistence. His refinements reached the point of an 
almost imperceptible fineness. His phrase became daily 
richer. Yet one could imagine all these virtues of mere 
manner, becoming, to some readers, nothing less than 
irritating. 

The art with which he described the absence of all 
action was greater than what other writers expended on 
literature of the between-the-eyes sort. His personages 
lived amid the perpetual flash of prophetically clear- 
sighted small-talk; they understood what was meant so 
long before it was said, that it had really been active 
philanthropy in Mr. James to have vaccinated actual so- 
ciety with some such cleverness. With delicate whimsy 
he spun his psychologic theorems, rarely stepping beyond 
the narrow bounds of his own and the sister-arts. 

Even when Mr. James issued from that " shop " period, 
and began a series of large and memorable canvases in 
the approved form of the novel, the cavillers did not 
cease. They objected, about one novel after another — I 
intend here no catalogue of them — that people of flesh 
and blood would soon enough, and definitely enough, have 
worked out such hazy problems as he set; they would 
have done things, instead of quibbling everlastingly about 
what might be done. Those objections were ill taken. 
Mr. James posed his people far too accurately; if we 
accepted them at all as possible personages, we had to 
accept, also, that what he showed them thinking, saying 
and doing was, for them, the inevitable. Nor could one 
justly continue the accusation that George Moore voiced 
inimitably once and for all time, years ago, that " right ] 
bang in front of the reader nothing happens. 
There is not so much as a hat thrown out of the window." 
In such a passage as this, from " The Golden Bowl," 



204 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

however, it seems to me that something did happen ; it 
is the one wherein the prince and his former flame rekindle 
their old amorous fires : 

" Of a sudden . . . everything broke up, broke 
down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought 
their lips, their pressure their response and their response 
their pressure ; with a violence that had sighed itself the 
next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses, 
they passionately sealed their pledge." 

No printed depreciations ever swerved Mr. James from 
his art as he had conceived it. He continued placidly 
tracing his intricate intellectual embroideries. That those 
embroideries became, with the years, more and more intri- 
cate ; that the confusion in him of so many hesitancies, 
tolerances, recessions, catholicities and questionings — the 
backings and fillings, in short, of the critical spirit — 
tended more and more to obscure definition and verdict ; 
that had indeed to be admitted. He became the logical 
issue of the analytical temper: the critic reduced to an 
almost absurd negation of dogma. Because he saw all 
sides so bravely, knew all the pros and cons, tried equally 
the catholic temper and the provincial, it became hard 
for him, as novelist, as essayist, or as critic, to say: 
It is. He was reluctant, even, to say: It seems. That 
tendency in him, that touch of the difficult and the opaque 
with which he involved his style, was what gave the cheap 
journalists their cues. However much, though, they may, 
with their easy derision, have amused the people who had 
neither the wit nor the courage to take their culture at 
first hand, they never affected the author himself. He 
went about his artistry in words, serene in being, for con- 
scientiousness at least, a master. 

In support of his mastery in passages of supreme 
beauty, descriptive, not only of intellectual subtleties, 
but of actual physical tangibilities, I must quote this pic- 
ture of an English country house in an English spring- 
time : 



MEN AND MANNERS 205 

What with the noble fairness of the place, the generous 
mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and 
heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at mo- 
ments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn't be dressed; 
what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, 
the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused . 
the stir of the air was such . . . every voice in the great 
bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of 
pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or 
danger; every aspect of the picture a glowing plea for the 
immediate . 

It would be difficult, surely, to paint with a brush more 
dipped in the sensuous, far as one mostly was from con- 
necting Mr. James with that temper. That passage, also, 
was from u The Golden Bowl," a story in which the au- 
thor's virtues were, it seems to me, most conspicuous. 
Plenty of things, fine, moving and splendid — in the re- 
cital, at any rate — happened in front of the reader in 
that story. The things that happened in suggestion 
should have been tremendous enough for the most avid 
gourmet of sensations. Observe, again, the completion 
of that passage first quoted: 

u It put them, it kept them together, through the 
vain show of their separation, made the two other faces, 
made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the 
lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, 
a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying 
and sometimes almost vertiginous." 

Quotation, however, is never fair to Mr. James. The 
dram-drinking reader, who wishes to taste here, sip there, 
skip everywhere, could do nothing with such work. He 
must drink it all, leisurely and with tender appreciation 
of each finesse, or not at all. Time and again, as in 
K "What Maisie Knew " or '"' The Ambassadors " or many 
other novels, he took the simplest case, and brought out 
of it such subtleties, such delicacies of shading, of situ- 
ation, and of characterisation, as made us see that not 



206 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

one of the many pages could have been omitted, not a 
phrase spared, lest the entire web show a flaw. No page 
could be taken separately as meaning anything whatso- 
ever; yet as part of the wonderful total it was exquisite 
mosaic. 

That was one of the quarrels people had with him; 
part of the ammunition of the easy parodist, — that the 
isolated page, the abstracted phrase, could so often be 
turned into sheer nonsense. If there was one writer easier 
than another to lampoon, to parody, it was Henry James. 
Note the following: 

The young man, in his actual mood, smiled. " Oh, I've 
precisely made that out." 

" Yes," she said, " if you hadn't by this time made out 
. . ." The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie 
presently contributed an idea in saying: "What has really 
happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered." 

He accepted, equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic 
remark. He quite took it in. He declined, however, to be 
drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too 
much like theories, in which one lost one's way. 

She immediately passed, at any rate, to another point. 
" It isn't anything that, after all, properly concerns even 

you." 

On this, for a little, they sat face to face. 

Now, always excepting Ollendorff and the classic ma- 
nipulators of the Greek particle, there was, of course, 
but one writer from whom such sentences could be ex- 
tracted. To a mind sufficiently unscrupulous as well as 
nimble it was always ridiculously easy to caricature page 
upon page of such talk from whatever happened to be 
Henry James's newest novel. In his " waters of talk " 
there were innumerable pools of phrase and verbiage that, 
torn from their surroundings, reflected absolutely nothing. 
For the purpose of parody, there was nothing more 
\\ tempting. Yet the paragraph above is not parody ; those 



MEN AND MANNERS 20? 

are literal extracts from " The Golden Bowl." The pos- 
sibilities for ridicule in such passages are as cheap as 
they are patent. 

I do not deny that I, too, have laughed. We all have 
our cheap moments. All the old and easy laughs against 
Mr. James I have laughed ; I have parodied him as easily 
and as well as the others have done it. I have sung 
the song of his obsession by the Greek particle. Not an- 
other writer living, I often enough reminded my readers, 
so larded his prose with the " even," the " indeed," the 
" at any rate," the " at least," and the " quite " which 
our memories recalled to us, chiefly, as belonging to the 
days when we were construing from Thucydides. Obser- 
vation, at the most superficial, did not show us those 
particles in actual conversational use to-day ; yet, at deep- 
est, we Avere forced to concede Mr. James as true an artist 
here as in all else. For, laugh as we might, at what a 
random page of his might disclose for ridicule, the 
summed-up pages, the book, remained always a work of 
art from the hand of a master. 

Occasional uglinesses of phrase, and needless inventions, 
could easily be found. I find in one place " inattackably 
straight," and in another " the rightest manner on the 
wrongest assumption." But against these, which you 
may duplicate in any one of his books, how many fortu- 
nate turns there were ! The number of happy phrases 
should have atoned for any labor spent in unraveling 
the more difficult windings of his prose. " In the Cage," 
for instance, showed several felicities that I recall. " A 
mere male glance " held pages of observation in it ; there 
was a grocer who had been dimly struck by " the con- 
catenation between the tender passion and cheap cham- 
pagne " ; in one luminous flash we were shown a couple 
resting on a park bench while " there were other couples 
on other benches, whom it was impossible not to see, yet 
at whom it was impossible to look " ; and the usual load 



208 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of steam boat excursionists was rounded up in the line 
" close packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment." 
In " The Golden Bowl " we could find " the moral and 
the murmur of his walk," and " the cigars of his youth, 
rank with associations." 

Nor would it be fair to pretend that his beauties of 
style were his artistic all. His characterisations were 
always instinct with truth. It was the work of a master 
who chose to spin subtleties, but was not, therefore, re- 
moved from the actual. When he told us, for instance, 
that we " Americans are almost incredibly romantic," he 
came to the core of a matter that so different a spirit as 
Professor Von Muensterberg laid bare more prosaically. 
In support of his theory of our romanticism, he once 
drew a picture of an American millionaire, a collector of 
precious objects, thus: 

It was all, at bottom, in him, the esthetic principle, 
planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame; where 
it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on 
the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of 
the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in 
spite of the general tendency of the " devouring element " 
to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scat- 
tered, and tended with unconscious care, escaped the con- 
sumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue 
keeping-up of profane altar-fires. 

He made, in that paragraph, considerable concession 
to his notion of the romance in the American character. 
The similarity to Pater's phrase about, the " hard, gem- 
like flame " was doubtless unpremeditated ; it may even 
have been part of a fine ironic intention. 

The paragraph, at any rate, brings me to that book 
by Mr. James in which he expanded his opinions about 
us as a nation, and as a society. If I have not room 
to indicate the many volumes of essays on art, on litera- 
ture, and on travel, that Mr. James had given us over 



MEN AND MANNERS 209 

and above his analysis, in the novel-form, of the Ameri- 
can, the English and the international social spirit, I 
yet must find room for some reference to his volume on 
" The American Scene." His stature as a man of let- 
ters was there once again defined. 

Never before had such wealth and such finesse of ob- 
servation been accorded our civilisation, Mr. James saw 
us both as one of ourselves and as a foreigner. He viewed 
us in the light of his own early Americanism, as well as 
in the comparative light of his later cosmopolitan, criti- 
cal self. Plainness and clearness were everywhere in this 
book; those who pretended weariness over Mr. James's 
reluctance to be obvious, to be dogmatic in face of a 
multitude of relativities, must have been hopelessly preju- 
diced or lazy. 

Our manner and our manners most interested him. 
There were no statistics about shipping, or railroads, or 
wealth. It was the type of people we were, the type 
of thought and life we lead, that interested this ob- 
server. He noted, about life in New England, for in- 
stance, the difference made in that land of long winters 
" by the suppression of the two great factors of the 
familiar English landscape, the squire and the parson." 
The feminine, almost Italian, texture of the New Eng- 
land landscape impressed him ; the occasional sordidness 
of its proper inhabitants, and its general air of appeal, 
in hope of future, of prosperity, to the Summer visitors. 
Similarly, having wondered at the awful speed with which 
we assimilate — or not — the alien, he found that alien, in 
New York, and elsewhere, the triumphant type, the Ameri- 
cans of age and standing seeming patiently to be sur- 
rendering, to be accepting a secondary place behind that 
alien. 

Into his distress about the dominant architecture in 
New York entered the sense that nothing about it was 
final. Where an ugly house now stands, a still uglier 
one might stand in twenty years. He pointed, from 



210 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Riverside Drive and elsewhere, to the grossly defacing 
railway, and observed that in any American scene the 
authority of the railway " sits enthroned," and that ap- 
parently " the country exists for the cars," not the cars 
for the country. If he had fathomed the dominance of 
our railroads, not only over our landscapes, but over the 
lives and comforts of thousands of our citizens, how 
much more might not Mr. James have been distressed ! 
He found our men failing to keep step, socially, with 
our women. Our society he summed up briefly, elaborating 
what he had often said in other places : " It takes an 
endless amount of history to make even a little tradition, 
and an endless amount of tradition to make even a little 
taste, and an endless amount of taste, by the same token, 
to make even a little tranquillity," — and it is that which 
our body social lacks. How sadly disenchanted, reminis- 
cent, was his chapter on Newport, now become, in contrast 
to its one-timed leisured, critical cosmopolitanism, " a 
mere breathing place for white elephants " ! What 
charming pages were those, based on his experience in 
the Baltimore Country Club, in which he discoursed so 
illuminatingly upon the apotheosis of the Family as seen 
in the country club province of American manners ! 

What was there, finally, in all this book, from which 
I have taken pains to quote typical turns, that was ob- 
scure, or difficult? 

Yet, I realise that the nonconformists will hardly con- 
form. There will always be Jacobites and Whigs. Per- 
haps we are a futile, pathetic crew, we Jacobites. Still 
— we are ! Outmoded, perhaps, but still — Jacobites ! 

Jacobites, and being so, drinking now and again to 
" the King over the water " ! 

Only one detail about Mr. James all true Jacobites 
must ever regret, and that is Edith Wharton. 

At first, even in the most bitter moments of one's 



MEN AND MANNERS 211 

critical chagrin, one presumed her Jacobite affiliations 
of style mere passing philandery. To play the sedulous 
ape, as we knew from Stevenson, had been the making 
of more than one eventually individual stylist. But this 
writer is now long past the formative period, and we 
are still confronted by a fixed habit, a confirmed vice. 
Jacobite English about Jacobite subjects is all she cares 
to engage in. Hers, indeed, is the most abnormal case 
we know of one artist being wedded to the art of another. 

Of all esthetic shibboleths perhaps the most cowardly 
is the one which declares So-and-so to be wedded to his 
or her art. Next to the one about " seeing life," this is 
the most abominable of pretexts. There comes a person 
too lazy to use good manners, too selfish to conform to 
decent custom; what is the excuse? "Wedded to art!" 
There comes between man and wife this or that dissension ; 
what is the excuse of the well-meaning idiots who always 
prove their friendship by free discussion of others' 
troubles ? " Wedded to art." You have only to recall 
the case of Emma Eames and Julian Story, one a singer, 
the other a painter. Both, said their friends — and here 
you must imagine a shoulder-shrug in the correct manner 
of the boulevard! — had, alas, the artistic temperament. 
The artistic temperament . . . ! Our forthright 
friends in Germany hit that nail on the head some years 
ago, in a merry little ditty which put " artistic tempera- 
ment " on the same plane, linguistically and actually, as 
some of those " actresses " whose chief appearances are 
made in the police-courts. 

How went the doggerel again? 

" Man muss patent sein, 
Voll Temperament sein, 
So'n bischen tra-la-la, la-la, la-la. . . ." 

Especially the detail indicated by the concluding myosis. 
" Artistic temperament," nine times out of ten, is simply 



212 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

a synonym for being " a bad lot." To the subject of 
the artistic temperament, of bohemianism, etc., I mean to 
devote some space in a later chapter. For the moment 
V^e are concerned with only Mrs. Wharton's artistic tem- 
perament, which resulted in her being hopelessly wedded 
to the art of Henry James. 

Quite aside from style, she enveloped all she touched 
in a thick Jacobean atmosphere, in which nothing human, 
not even an emotion, could stir. If any of her heroes 
and heroines had ever escaped out of that fog into real 
life, they would easily have overcome all the difficulties 
her prose presented; they would have wedded each other 
and not Mrs. Wharton's art. 

For that was always a sort of bigamy, or proxy affair, 
at best ; since Mrs. Wharton's art was really Mr. James's 
art — and the rest you may find in Euclid, which is also 
an element, like the element of Mrs. Wharton's books, in 
which nothing whatever happens, except such things as, 
in the old Punch phrase, " we might have wished differ- 
ently put." 



CHAPTER SIX 

That Henry James cannot be claimed altogether by 
America is generally admitted. He reached his stature 
as a man of letters only after he ceased subjecting him- 
self to the conditions of American literature. He was 
American only in this : his birth, his use of American sub- 
ject matter, and his writing the American as often as the 
English language. As a man of letters we have tried to 
place him, however, curtly. The detail of his language 
leads to a subject that has interested me profoundly, 
namely : 

The question of our language, written and spoken. 

The colloquialisms, English and American, that Mr. 
James used so artistically, will serve to lead us gradually 
to slang, and to the various crimes committed in America 
against spoken and printed speech. 

As a propagator of American colloquialisms Mr. James 
became notable early in his career. Slang, as we know, 
always runs the risk of becoming what the provincial 
terms dictionary English. The process of sloughing off 
the coat of slangdom, and developing as language, is an 
unconscious one, and one in which the majority of speak- 
ing and writing people are only automatic factors. Oc- 
casionally, however, a conscious professor of the art airs 
the courage of his convictions about some new colloquial- 
ism deserving use in literature. Professor Brander Mat- 
thews, for instance, attacked this subject in his volume 
called " Parts of Speech," and elsewhere. He teetered 
politely from one side of the case to the other; he was 
amiably tolerant ; and he entered into the most suave 
explanations. He argued that as language grew, so the 
time approached when the sheer numerical supremacy of 
213 



214 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

the American population would shift the central criterion 
for the spoken and written word from the English to the 
American side of the water. 

These professors, you see, Brander Matthews and Wil- 
liam James, agree that American literary and linguistic 
supremacy can be achieved by sheer force of numbers. 
Which same I consider a most dangerous fallacy. 

Let me remind you again of the negro and the rabbit. 

Though in the main Professor Matthews discussed the 
matter temperately and reasonably, you could pick plenty 
of flaws even in his tolerance. After bringing out his 
favorite statistical weapon, and declaring that as lan- 
guage is the tool of the people who use it, so it must 
sway to the custom of the majority, he regarded com- 
placently the passing from common use of the subjunctive 
mood. There his own argument defeats him. It happens, 
in the case of the English subjunctive, that the mouths 
of the common people still preserve what the lettered 
professors seem so ready to surrender ; the form " If you 
be going " can be heard constantly in New England. 

The author of " Parts of Speech " made his book pleas- 
antly readable, thereby fulfilling the first duty of his call- 
ing; but just as his arguments were often fallacious, so 
was the very language in which he discussed language. 
He was guilty of such metaphor as this : " The English 
language is the tool of the people who speak English 
and who have made it to fit their hands." Only a very 
dull person could refrain from wondering if the author 
of that talked with his hands. 

Finally, in that book and for many years after, Pro- 
fessor Matthews, with many other professors of varying 
degrees, counseled the reform of our spelling. Now, in 
view of the abominable English heard in our supposedly 
most cultured places ; of the utter absence of correct 
conversation in those teaching, much less those learning, 
English in our schools ; all such pother about spelling 
has always struck me as supremely ridiculous. My friend 



MEN AND MANNERS 215 

Charles F. Lummis, one of the few men on the continent 
with a real care for, and skill in, the language, having 
once had the Century Dictionary flung at him, retorted 
that he would engage, even at his normal rates, though 
dictionary writing was much harder than plain writing, 
" to supply a volume large enough to add to a set of the 
Century Dictionary, and devoted to a compact correction 
of the blunders — the sore and shameful blunders — of the 
Century Dictionary touching the English language as 
she is defined for the United States and the New World 
in general." Mr. Lummis's ire once started, he continued, 
in support of the main text upon which I write this book : 

If so many good men would bother us as much with an 
attempt to teach the young men and women of this country 
to write something worth while, and in decent English, in 
almost any old spelling; or if they would combine their ada- 
mantine faces against the average output of books and maga- 
zines, erotic, neurotic and tommyrotic — or if they would do 
any other grown-up, two-fisted, useful thing, and let our 
poor old letters alone — I think they would better apply their 
industry. 

A vigorous statement of the case. The latter part 
especially. With the former, even though it be but in its 
suggestion, I could quarrel, since it hints the so-called 
" school of writing " as permissible. In view of the quan- 
tity of bad English put out by the supposed professors 
of the art of writing, it is terrible to contemplate the re- 
sult if they had pupils. What is needed is not schools 
or professors to teach writing, but a penitentiary for 
bad writers. 

As against the doctrinal method employed by our pro- 
fessors, Mr. James's manner was far more artistic, far 
more convincing. 

In that subtle conversational manner of his he simply 
used his newly found phrases ; he blithely, gaily, put them 



216 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

into his literary pages, and asked of his readers only that 
they admit his slang to be apt, and saving of time and 
verbiage. In that delicate way of his he went far further 
toward putting the hall-mark of literary respectability 
on certain American linguistic devices than anyone else 
had done. In his story " In the Cage," for instance, 
were such turns as " She had caught on," " I've seen the 
thing through," and " The other party had a pull," sit- 
ting amid the hot-house flowers of Mr. James's English. 
He was always, in this respect, an apparent contra- 
diction. In one breath he exhausted himself — or his 
reader — with tortuous complications of plot and mental 
stress ; in the next he plied us with the most modern 
phrases, the most direct turns of slang. He kept a mar- 
vellous balance between the sheer literary instinct and the 
faculty of seizing and holding the newest argot of so- 
ciety or the street. If he gave us Americanisms, he also 
gave us the article of slang as England used it. One 
character in " In the Cage " averred that " it was im- 
possible sufficiently to put it on," which, to the untraveled 
American, might have easily been sheer Greek. Written 
" pile it on," we would have had the American of it. 

The question of American speech eventually engaged 
Mr. James more directly than in his novels. He brought 
home to us some of the vices in our speech by way of 
public lectures and the little volume called " The Ques- 
tion of Our Speech." 

He touched, there, matter which has long irritated 
everyone who has taste and ear. 

Nothing, not even what is written, more intimately con- 
cerns our literature than the manner in which our lan- 
guage is spoken. Quite aside from questions of academic 
correctness, the lack of beauty in our spoken tongue had 
long been painful to all who had ears of any sort of 
efficacy. The faults Mr. James most specifically deplored 
were by no means the only ones discernible. Just as in 



MEN AND MANNERS 217 

the British manner of speech many absurd vices have 
been pointed out by the Irishman, Bernard Shaw, so in 
the American pronunciation which has the prestige of 
society there are the most exasperating mannerisms. These 
have never been sufficiently pointed out. One professor 
has discussed slang; H. Thurston Peck has defined some 
of the little touches denoting taste or the lack of it; 
but the detail of our speech being rotten at the top, so 
to say, has never been properly emphasised. 

I have watched this evil growing for a decade and 
more. It was often most noticeable in the very persons 
who were sneering at whatever slang happened to be, 
at the moment, the habit for the man in the street. 
These experiences have taught me to doubt both the 
genuineness of the fashionables and the scholiasts ; and 
until I can some day hear their actual pronunciation I 
keep my privilege of politely doubting our professors, 
just as I despise the fashionables who deliberately maim 
our speech. 

The men and women in the parlor-cars, in the palm- 
rooms and gardens of our fashionable hotels, and in our 
floating palaces, are the ones who sin more grievously 
against our speech than do the most unlettered of the 
men of the street. They, moreover, have not the excuse 
of ignorance; theirs is conscious, purposed vice. It is as 
much more reprehensible as is the act of the skilful 
poisoner than the chance blow of passion. They deliber- 
ately defile and pollute our speech to feed what serves 
them as vanity, pride and egoism. Just as in the days of 
the Hotel Rambouillet the fine ladies and fine gentlemen 
were so refining the French language as to make it, had 
they succeeded, an idiom which only themselves could 
understand, so now our upper ten millions are in a fair 
way to turn the English language into a mumbo- jumbo. 

For this fashionable mumbo- jumbo of the moment I 
have found a label which reads simply : 



218 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

" Hot Mush Talk." 

Onomatopoeias lead inevitably to that title. When first 
the sounds produced by these people in conversation strike 
the ear, they make the ingenuous listener fancy he has 
struck an assemblage of breakfast-food tasters. Each 
mouth is apparently full up with some hot, choking sub- 
stance that prevents distinct utterance. You long, as 
you listen, for even the painfully precise, the sternly in- 
cisive syllabification of the Westerner; he, after all, does 
treat the language with reverence. The mush-mouthed 
folk of fashion and of millions deliberately debase the 
spoken medium. 

It must have begun, I think, about the time that the 
Anglo-mania, first notably lampooned by Mrs. Burton 
Harrison, became observable in America. British and 
American fa.shionable regions were beginning the ex- 
changes which have since grown to such importance and 
frequence. One of the first of those resulted in Americans 
landing in England with a twang, and returning with 
that twang made more abominable by the effort to inflect 
and produce the language as do Londoners of fashion. 
This curious importation grew and developed to an ugli- 
ness that is now nothing less than alarming. Compound 
of bastard Briticisms and inescapable nasalities, it is 
delivered from mouths apparently abrim with steaming 
porridge or whatever else of that sort might prevent 
actual articulation. The syllables cannot be really said 
to issue at all. They blend in one inchoate vowel sound ; 
the consonants die before they are decently born. The 
whole method of speech employed by these mush-mouthers 
is a miscarriage of language. 

It was my fate, not long ago, to cross on a fashionable 
Cunarder. Aboard were so many representatives of 
fashion and money, of all nationalities, that the news- 
papers had let loose, on sailing day, the cliche alleging 
an exodus of millionaires, which is used at least once a 



MEN AND MANNERS 219 

week the year round by every newspaper printing the 
advertisements of the shipping companies. 

Much as I may prefer, individually, the society of dogs, 
or even of books ; in such cramped circumstances I found 
myself forced to hear, if not to see, certain idiosyncracies 
of some of those Americans whom the newspapers conspire 
to consider notable. So that, before fate and the har- 
bor of Genoa finally took me from that environment, I 
began to hail with delight the English pronunciation of 
a South American Jew, of a Hungarian sportsman, and 
of a French bonne. They, at least, were trying for dis- 
tinctness and clarity. My fellow-citizens were producing 
fog instead of consonants, and mush instead of vowels. 

I despair of reproducing this lingo. A great field 
awaits the writer who will accurately print the spoken 
tongue of our most conspicuous people. I wonder Mrs. 
Wharton has not made the attempt. She tried Jacobite 
English ; why not the English of mush-and-Manhattan ? 

To the thousands who for years have heard this fashion- 
able perversion of pronunciation, there is no more need 
to explain the nature of this speech, than there is to ex- 
plain the difference between Cockney and Cork. Still, 
since the literary, rather than the quotidian record, is in 
my mind, let me attempt the only possible reproduction 
of some of these mealy sounds that pass as fashionable 
American English ; namely, by onomatopoeia. 

" H w a h-y ? " That is as near as they come to " How 
are you? " 

" Lurrh-y pah-y ! " is supposed to equal " Lovely 
party ! " 

Further specification will serve no purpose. Even 
onomatopoeia fails. Only the horrible phonograph could 
give back this horrible language. Its essentials are en- 
tire ellipsis of the significant consonants, and malforma- 
tion of the vowels. On this main body, many equally 
vicious offenses are grafted. The person of casual fashion 
but constant apishness still lengthens the " a " in the 



220 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

wrong place, and then, in the same breath, flats in full 
Philadelphia method; still indulges in foreign importa- 
tions, abominably mismouthed; and therewith lapses 
everywhere and anywhere into the most amusing provin- 
cialisms. 

In fine, our spoken American language is threatened 
from the top down. Slang and all the perishing inven- 
tions of the vulgate do not menace one tithe as sombrely 
as does this mannered mouthing by the plutocrats. An 
amusing series of articles was once printed upon the Poor 
Taste of the Rich in household decoration and furnishing. 
But it is not, happily, incumbent on the ordinary person 
of intelligence to penetrate to the Penates of the enmil- 
lioned. That same person, however, cannot always escape 
the sound of the enmillioned creature's speech. 

Listening to such people, apparently the most fortunate 
of our citizens, one wonders whence has arisen the inter- 
national superstition about American culture. It is too 
large a matter for my present canvas ; it is matter for an 
entire book ; I hope I may not have to write it ! Just 
now I must content myself with emphasising the fact 
that, until our moneyed minority, to say nothing of our 
average millions, show some concern for spoken English, 
the professorial argument that written literature can 
come out of sheer numbers is rather a sorry thing. 

At one end of the scale is the millionaire and his hot- 
mush talk; at the other is Mr. James's triumphant alien, 
taking the conqueror's liberty with our language. Is it 
not a pleasant picture? And out of that, if you please, 
they expect literature ! 

Is there no middle class — using the term (lest too much 
fur fly!) as applicable to intelligence or to posterity? 
Of course there is ! And again there comes a figure from 
that gallery of disenchantment I call Memory. There 
boarded another liner, not so long ago, at Dover, a Vision, 
a perfect vision. A Daisy Miller of Twenty Years After. 
Figure and face of a charm; gown of a perfection, that 



MEN AND MANNERS 221 

only America plus Paris can achieve. Well, we were not 
fairly out of the Channel before those exquisitely chiseled 
lips had opened to set loose their store of disenchantment. 
A year or so in Europe, I assure you, had done nothing 
save make rather a varied idiot out of a simple one. With 
all the chances for enlightenment — for learning all those 
" little touches " Professor Peck has praised — which twelve 
months abroad must offer even the most benighted, this 
Vision, entirely surrounded by Money and males, had 
gathered little save this conclusion: 

" I don't know how I'm ever going to stand it in Cin- 
cinnati again! I just had the grandest time; I guess 
we were invited most every place, on the Riverrira, and 
all. Honest, I never went to bed till three all the time 
we were away. Pm just crazy about Europe." 

Murdering the French language with an accent which 
had never yet achieved decent English, the Vision prattled 
gay worse-than-nothings blithely, quite innocent of the 
fact that after listening to her for ten minutes every 
self-respecting male, unless hopelessly blinded by physics, 
had to use much self-repression to keep from murdering 
her. Regarding her, one realised that Daisy Miller is an 
eternal type. 

The only difference between Henry James's heroine 
and her newer version is that the latter would make no 
bones about writing a novel. It would never occur to her 
that ability to think logically and talk properly had any- 
thing to do with so easy a thing as writing. Why, 
surely, anybody can write ! Yes, and as we regard re- 
sults, it often seems that — criticism being a dead letter — 
some of the people writing books must be people who, in 
any really cultured society, simply would never be allowed 
to open their mouths, much less put pen to paper. 

If I offered specimens of the rubbish shot almost weekly 
in book form, parading as English prose, or as human dia- 
logue, there would be no room for anything else. But 
a few gems are too glittering to keep from you; they 






%m THEIR DAY IN COURT 

may prove to you my contention that when people who 
know no more of life or of human speech than these are 
permitted to print books, a few publishers should be burnt 
in the market-place for the general good of literature. 

You will recall the impossible speech that Lucas Malet 
put into the mouth of the heroine of " Sir Richard Cal- 
mady," as quoted on page 38. One, Annie E. Holds- 
worth, comes into competition for the cap and bells with 
a similar speech, in a gaudy paste imitation of a book 
that she called " A New Paola and Francesca." She made 
her heroine talk like this, describing her own thoughts : 

They are like the wind harping in the high boughs of the 
pines. They are like the wind, swift-footed, folding wide 
spaces about it like a garment. They are like the wind, rest- 
less, moaning in the night with the burden of the souls that 
sin. And again, they are like the wind, wistful as the kiss 
you give a newborn baby. 

It is needless to say that no sane person ever talked 
like that. 

Such stilted and shoddy stuff is especially damnable 
in dialogue. Let an author, as the artist behind the 
scene, write as fine as can be; that is quite another 
matter. Hewlett writes pages of sheerly beautiful ar- 
tistry; but who writes directer, more human dialogue? 
Nor, in the case of this Holdsworth person, have we the 
excuse of the novice. She was hardened; she had written 
several novels, so-called. She was simply one of those 
who wilfully distorted spoken language in the belief that 
doing so made literature. There are a great many vic- 
tims of that disease. 

Top-hat Prose is what I have called it. 

Even so accomplished an artist as A. W. Pinero in- 
dulges, in play after play, in this top-hat prose. He 
makes his characters, time and again, talk " like a book." 



MEN AND MANNERS 223 

That good critic, A. B. Walkley, pointed this out, giv- 
ing many an amusing specimen of the playwright's too 
literary dialogue. Mr. Pinero probably did this deliber- 
ately; we know that in the theatre there is a theory that 
everything must be emphasised or your audience will lose 
it. In literature there is no such exculpating theory 
possible. The only reason such stuff gets printed is 
that our publishers and our public have so far prevented 
the foolkiller from doing his duty. 

Mr. William Dean Howells remarked only the other 
day, in the course of an effort to be optimistic about 
American literature, that this was not an age in which 
literary masterpieces were published. When even so 
hardy a meliorist as Mr. Howells makes such an admis- 
sion, you will see how just are my animadversions against 
things as they are. Several other things he admitted 
which amused me; his remarks were published at the 
very moment of my writing this. He admitted our 
writers lacked good taste. What else have I tried to 
prove in those examples of salacity cited? The subject 
was beside the case; the good taste, and true art — those 
were conspicuously lacking ; that lack was the typical de- 
fect which I deplored. Mr. Howells, again, regretted the 
fact that " popular success " was all our writers aimed 
for. " Find me," said I, when I began this book, " any 
tendency in our letters save the commercial ! " And now, 
even before all my facts are marshaled, Mr. Howells sup- 
ports my argument. For this, much thanks ! 

Throughout that interview Mr. Howells, striving con- 
stantly for kindness, still let the truth shine through the 
lines. You could read in his optimism quite as hearty 
an arraignment, quite as sorrowful an admission, of our 
defects of taste and art, as the most prejudiced censor 
could achieve. He concluded, however, with the fine old 
allegation that our annual average was high, and that 
probably no writer ever really intended to write badly. 

Ah, those good old lies, how hard they die! Whatever 



2M THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Australia may say to the contrary some day the rabbit 
family will undoubtedly produce a genius ? And 

we are to pardon the person who, lacking taste or even 
decent English, rushes into print, simply on the score 
that his intentions may be good? We must not point 
the finger of scorn at these inrushing fools hell-bent with 
books for paving stones? Why so timid, Mr. Howells? 
Why these half-truths? 

If we allow such stilted and shoddy dialogue, such 
top-hat prose, as that of Annie E. Holdsworth, or Louis 
M. Elshemus, or scores of others, to go unrebuked, how 
can we expect the vast army of the half-educated, who 
are trying to help their crude state by indiscrimi- 
nate reading, to be saved from intellectual damna- 
tion ? 

There is always, especially in so huge an army as tha£ 
of American readers, constantly recruiting from the but 
lately quite unlettered, a great mass which prefers shoddy 
to genuine, and mistakes exaggeration for conviction. It 
regards exuberance of rhetoric, spoken or written, as 
the finest flower of thought and expression. So it comes 
that with a certain type of mind plain, direct, Anglo- 
Saxon is anything but the mark of Literature with a 
large L. These hold that to write just as people talk 
is to demean the Jovian possibilities of the language ; they 
prefer the elaborately ornate and grandiose. 

They worship Top-hat Prose. 

How else can we account for the popularity of those 
who supply the shoddy, the stilted, the unreal? If it 
were not for the eternal apishness in our majority, those 
fakers of English could not survive. That apishness is 
proven in much that is spoken by the people, to refer 
back, for a moment, to that subject. The provincial, 
of Harlem or of Hackensack, imitates a tongue com- 
pound of American stage speech and the bastard Eng- 
lish spoken by our fashionables ; those come newly from 
the interior imitate the Harlem imitation : and our fash- 



MEN AND MANNERS 225 

ionables imitate their dream of London speech. The dream 
is a nightmare, and the whole vicious circle of imitation 
results in nightmare. 

I wonder if Mr. Howells would counsel pardon, on the 
score of good intentions, to such a person as Louis M. 
Elshemus, for instance? 

Here was one whose authority to write about manners, 
and whose manner of writing, were exposed thus : 

" He stopped at a swell boarding hotel, where only 
the elite of society resorted." 

" Such is the ludicrous side of the nouveaux riches eti- 
quette. My goodness! speak of monarchy? Plutocracy 
eclipses that ! " 

Was it not easy^ to see, in this atmosphere of " bug- 
gies," " buckboards," of the " swell " and the " elite " 
that in the author of " A Triple Flirtation," which by 
permission of our damnable public patience was called a 
book, we had a social satirist of sorts? Do you note the 
exquisite taste in those brief extracts, the exact echo of 
fashionable phraseology? In the drawing-rooms of our 
best people this was the sort of English used? No; even 
I have not accused our fashionables of that ! 

Was it not typical that such a book could get printed? 
Here was a person so impudent that he could write 
" American girls deem politeness rank idiocy," and could 
discuss the " extravagances in the manners of the nou- 
veaux riches," without being able to write a decent sen- 
tence in the English language. Yet Mr. Howells would 
have this sort pardoned on the score of good intentions ! 
A fellow of such monumental lack in humor that he could 
criticise a whole society in terms that would make the 
fortune of an Ollendorff, an Ahn, or the Rogers Brothers ! 
You know the true saying that clear thinking means good 
writing? Apply the test to this graceful specimen of fog 
from Mr. Elshemus : 



226 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Two persons possessed with a versatile nature understand 
each other so well they need no introduction; observing each 
other's actions, they at once are aware that they are similar, 
and the mere eye-glance tells to them that they are equally 
well gifted; thus it is how friendship grows rapidly between 
them, and this friendship is lasting; their gifts and various 
powers lie on the same fields till their death. 

" Thus it is," in short, that Mr. Elshemus's case 
yearned for the foolkiller. There are perfections of vari- 
ous sorts, of course; and being a perfect idiot may be a 
distinction; but is that a license to print? 

One of the wonders of this world will always be why so 
many of the misguided creatures who think they can 
write invariably approach subjects of which they are espe- 
cially ignorant. It took no more than a page or two of 
" A Triple Flirtation " to disclose the fact that its au- 
thor's intelligence was that of a kitchen maid, yet he 
could not leave fashionable life alone. He called it names, 
after proving he knew nothing about it. He tried to 
suggest a libertine, and did it thus : " When a young 
man he already enjoyed the society of women, and oft- 
times was he brought home earlier than was his wont." 

Yet, because of possible good intentions, we were to 
pardon such stuff? Here was a thing masquerading as 
a book, written in terms that any graduate of a village 
school should have been ashamed of. Instead of Eng- 
lish, here was jargon; and the views of life expressed 
sounded like the observations of a socialistic footman. 
There never was a more flagrant instance of the frauds 
that our too great tolerance allows. If the Salmagundi 
Club had to listen to this sort of thing, it was pity 
enough; but that it should be permitted as a book — 
that is a crime which demands castigation. Admirable 
as is the attitude of Mr. Howells, it is yet the prevalence 
of that very attitude which has left the gates of our 
literature so undefended against the fools. 

The case of the author of " A Triple Flirtation " was 



MEN AND MANNERS 227 

an extreme one of a hopeless and amateurish bungler. 
This person simply did not know the rudiments of clear 
thinking. He had no right whatever to be allowed into 
print. 

But Top-hat Prose is written, as we saw in the case 
of Pinero, by many whom we would never have suspected 
of it. I shall cite one specimen of it by a clergyman, 
another by an author who was once praised by 
Punch. 

In the case of the clergyman it was the fine, mouth- 
filling, polysyllabic style. Thus spake a young woman 
in Charles Van Norden's novel called " Yoland of Idle 
Isle": 

" Pauline, who is that fine gentleman at the other 
end of the veranda, of such imperious manners, who con- 
stantly glances this way and so boldly, and who lingers 
there in view of my little levee? I do not recognise him 
and I dislike him. He impresses me as overbearing." 

Given imperturbable good humor, you could laugh at 
this book for the same reason that you laugh at a bellow- 
drama of the " Jessie Left the Village " sort, screaming 
at its unintentional absurdities ; but if you consider it as 
English, as prose, as print, as something pretending to 
thought or speech, you can only hate the people who 
conspire to let such stuff get printed. 

Again, in a story, that London Punch had the hardi- 
hood to commend, entitled " Susan," was this speech from 
the hero : 

" A thousand curses on their heads who have brought 
us all to this ! . . . Gertrude Langley, for five weeks 
I have loved you, and there is no woman in the world, 
save you, that I ever did love, or ever shall. . . ." 

" Gertrude Langley, etc.," wasn't it exactly like the 
fine mouthfuls of name they give one another on the 
Bowery stage? If our hero had loved his Gertrude for 
five weeks he should have known better than to address 



228 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

her as if she were in the witness-box, or at the end of 
the factory's bread-line. 

I do not for a moment deny that there are people who 
talk like that, but I deny that they should be allowed 
about, especially not in print. 

In any new civilisation the period of polysyllabic 
speech is as inevitable as any other form of pubescence. 
You have only a little to keep your ears open to realise 
that the less people know of their own language the more 
stiltedly they try to mouth it. The nearest Chautauqua 
will supply all the half-cultured English you may want 
to sample. It may not be necessary to quarrel with this 
period; if there were never a course of sprouts to go 
through, the finished growth might never be reached. 
Unless one happens to be at sea with them, as I said 
before, we do not have to listen to these people. It is an 
unfortunate fact that a great many of them — having de- 
cided that by virtue of their own mentally unlicked con- 
dition they are fit to become teachers of other people's 
children — are able to travel abroad from time to time 
and so spread the European notion that we are a nation 
without either manners or mannered speech. They go 
about, using their interminable words, dwelling ponder- 
ously on every syllable as if they were suspected of not 
knowing its spelling; always asking people where they 
" reside," or when they " retire " ; never using a simple 
Saxon word when a long Latin one is in their rag-bag 
of undigested " culture " ; and all that the rest of us can 
do is to escape the sound of them as best we may. 

In print it is not so easy to escape these people, and 
in print they are a very pestilence. For beneath every 
lowest stratum of half-culture there are always yet lower 
strata ; and if we let people who think crudely and talk 
clumsily get those thoughts and speeches into print, those 
who are still more ignorant may seriously take the result 
as literature. Such long-winded hogwash, through its 



MEN AND MANNERS 229 

very bombast, its familiarity with magniloquent phrases, 
impresses the entirely unlettered far more than does really 
simple and beautiful art. So the vicious chain may wind 
on, one bit of bombast breeding another. No law, no 
critical censorship, could possibly be severe enough, to 
prevent such rubbish getting into print. Do you say that 
nobody is compelled to read? No ; but the great majority 
is without taste ; it does not know one book from an- 
other; it picks up one as easily as another; the paid 
eulogists of the newspapers are as eloquent for the bad 
as for the good; and, as just noted, bombast impresses 
the uneducated far more than does anything else. 

One of my specimens of polysyllabic bombast was writ- 
ten by an American clergyman. That such a man should 
preach a heaven seems cruelty even to the half-cultured; 
the printed evidence shows he thinks in terms of bombast, 
and is no more entitled, by that token, to minister to the 
minds of his fellow-men than is the savagest barbarian 
that ever crooned over glass beads. 

You may reproach me with losing my temper about a 
very little matter. But if I have proved anything at all 
it is that it is one of the fundamental things that is the 
matter with our literature, that we let in every Tom, 
Dick and Harry who thinks he can write as easily as he 
breathes. You may also remind me that publishers often 
have nothing to do with such books as I have just been 
quoting from ; that such books are really printed by the 
authors, who simply pay for the publisher's imprint. 
Quite true; yet, if it miss the publishers, the indictment 
still holds against the newspapers, who do nothing to 
prevent such frauds. The policy of absolute silence 
would kill such stuff as surely as censure. 

Meanwhile — the gates swing open, and the fools 
rush in. 

Almost any excuse will do. The reasons which prompted 
the Elshemus and Van Norden attempts at authorship I 



230 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

do not know ; but one of the most naive confessions came, 
I remember, from Philadelphia. A Philadelphia merchant, 
Mr. Finley Acker, having " done Egypt," his friends re- 
quested the publication of his articles in book form. 
Ah — what a dead past, or what visions of Philadelphia, 
rise at sound of those fine shibboleths, of those who " con- 
sent to write " and are " requested to publish " ! 

Surely the age of consent, in this particular, too, 
should be fixed by law! 

For this was what our consenting Philadelphian ob- 
served in serious print: 

The water of the Nile is more murky than either the 
Schuylkill or the Delaware, but when it appears as drink- 
ing water upon the table it is as clear as crystal, and the 
wonderful transformation from offensive muddiness into 
crystalline purity is due to the simple process of filtration. 

Could you more clearly have crystallised a reproach to 
Philadelphia — which unfortunately it has not yet heeded 
— with an elaboration on the statement that two and two 
make four? 

Let me go further, and declare that, critically consid- 
ered, ours is the Age of Consent. 

The vice of literary affectation is terribly insidious. 
Men who are by nature blunt and true become, the mo- 
ment they touch pen and ink, stilted and tortuous. Per- 
sonally, some of our most Awful Examples may be direct 
and decent folk, — though it is main hard to think so. 
The writing itch distorts all but the strongest characters. 
Only the most determined artist, the one who has over- 
come many temptations, sifted away much chaff, succeeds 
in simplicity. Yet simplicity is often the finest style of 
all. In my chapter on style I took what may seem an 
opposing view; but I was making really to the same con- 
clusion. 

The theory of simplicity in art was once, however, 
exposed to ridicule. Since the case of Mr. Hamlin Gar- 



MEN AND MANNERS 231 

land included the writing of much absurd and impossible 
dialogue, it comes properly into this discussion. 

When you assert that no man who has not plowed 
should ever write about plowing, it is a pity if your 
realism, your truth to life and speech, fails you so utterly 
that your attempt to reproduce English speech results 
in pure nonsense. Time and again Mr. Garland, who for 
years preached naturalism and sincerity to all the rest 
of us, wrote, as the speech of Englishmen, such sounds 
as no human being in either Old or New England ever 
evolved. So doing, he made valueless all the theories he 
had been preaching so many years. Why could he not 
have stuck to his plows and other Western implements? 
He was at home there; he put simple and true art into 
his treatment of that material; why could he not have 
left alone the things he was ignorant of? Applying his 
own preachment, no man who is ignorant of the British 
accent should try to reproduce it. But Mr. Garland 
printed these words, as part of an Englishman's speech: 

" Cawn't — kneow — abeout — proveoking — deont. 

" Your blawsted sentimentality seems note to do you 
any harm." 

Mr. Garland's notion of English speech would be 
amusing to English people, but the case is really far more 
serious than that. This incorrect, absurd, reproduction 
of an impossible accent, amounts to an indictment against 
the truth of his entire art. A man who, in the matter of 
an accent, can stray so far from truth, may be deceiving 
the reader at every other point. The whole fabric of 
his vaunted realism, veritism, naturalism — or whatever he 
calls his method — falls to the ground when he so com- 
pletely proves the insincerity of his art. 

Which was the more saddening if we recalled that he, 
of all writers, had forever gone about suspecting the sin- 
cerity of his fellows. 

But for that lecturing attitude of his, Mr. Garland's 
licentious invention of impossible dialogue would not be so 



232 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

immensely funny. Lecturing, however, was something 
he never could refrain from ; both from the platform and 
in print he tried to spread his notions as to both material 
and manner proper to literary art. All of which made 
it the more imperative that in his own art he should avoid 
the first principles of the unconsciously absurd. 

Surely there was never anything much more funny 
than an apostle of Chicago culture finding fault with the 
King's English! 

No disrespect, mind you, to Chicago ! For Chicago 
itself saw the ridiculousness of Mr. Garland, and we 
must thank one of its artists for the most delicious satire 
ever aimed at Mr. Garland. 

Henry B. Fuller, it is true, belongs to Chicago only 
by an accident of residence; as an artist, he was one 
of our half dozen American stylists. His art was of no 
special time or place ; it was fine and delicate manipula- 
tion of beautiful prose, except only where he let Chicago 
enter into his subject matter. His " Chevalier of Pen- 
sieri Vani " was a triumph of prose ; it proved everything 
I hinted in my chapter on Style ; it will outlive all the 
" best sellers " of the last fifteen years. What satire Mr. 
Fuller was capable of, his sketch of Abner Joyce in his 
book called " Under the Skylights," I must try to brief 
for you. The sketch, line on line, touch after touch, hit 
off Mr. Hamlin Garland so patly, that it belongs in our 
present argument. It was a document in the history of 
American culture and American literature. 

Here, in outline, is Mr. Fuller's sketch of Abner Joyce: 
Intense earnestness was the keynote of his art and his 
life. The world, and especially the town, was a riot of 
ills crying to be mended; he was strenuous for its refor- 
mation. Civilised society made him ill; the only thing 
that did not make him ill was his own work. He had 
no sense of humor, and nobody was sincere but himself. 
Clubs, to him, were " places where the profligate children 



MEN AND MANNERS 233 

of Privilege drank improper drinks and told improper 
stories and kept improper hours. Abner, who was per- 
fectly pure in word, thought and deed, and always in 
bed betimes, shrank from a club as from a lazaret." He 
refused wine at dinner; he would not wear the conven- 
tional dinner clothes. (He was, in short — this is not Mr. 
Fuller's, but my own, suggestion — the Keir Hardie of 
Chicago. Or, again, you may compare his case to Ber- 
nard Shaw's, if you have not too much regard for the 
latter. In Keir Hardie's case, the radical quieted down at 
approach of worldly and political success ; in the Amer- 
ican instance, marriage achieved the same result ; you may 
find that age-old process, that transformation of " Soil 
Und Haben " on every page of the world's history.) 

Abner, in fact, was a person who ought to have been 
kicked. His body, however, was as rugged as his spirit; 
in youth he had followed the plow. But even a veritist, a 
sermoniser on " sincerity," had to bow to the inevitable 
when it took the form of woman. He married, thereafter 
took wine, dressed decently, and talked no more of his 
own books than others'. 

Mr. Fuller's book, in which was this sketch, was full 
of delicate and discriminating combinations of apprecia- 
tion and satire aimed at the booming quest for culture 
in Chicago. Here was Culture spelt with a very large C. 
Since Mr. Fuller wrote his romanesques of Italy, he had 
done nothing so graceful as this, both for satire and 
sympathy. The struggling artists in that western en- 
vironment drew his sympathy, as surely as the material 
atmosphere of the western metropolis drew his satire. 
Above all, the clear character-sketch of Abner showed 
how exquisitely Mr. Fuller had enjoyed the artistic at- 
titudinising of Mr. Garland. 

In artistic attitudinising there are several sorts. There 
was the posturing of Oscar Wilde. There was the Top- 
hat Attitude of the charlatans and the prigs. And there 



234 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was also, if I may coin a term to cap an opposite, the 
Sombrero Attitude. Joaquin Miller, years before, had 
impressed Europe with that attitude. He was a genius ; 
Mr. Garland was not; yet his attitude was the Sombrero 
Attitude. 

In Abner Joyce Mr. Fuller drew that attitude to the 
life. 

There was the passage, already quoted, anent Abner's 
severe purity; the theory of veritism, dictating the crea- 
tion of farm-fiction only to writers who had been farmers, 
was equally a part of this life-like picture. A new book 
by Abner was described " as gloomy, strenuous and posi- 
tive as its predecessor " ; which latter had contained a 
dozen stories " twelve clods of earth gathered, as it were, 
from the very fields across which he himself, a farmer's 
boy, had once guided the plough." Could Mr. Garland's 
" Main Traveled Roads " have been more clearly pointed 
out? Then we were made to note the humorlessness of 
Abner, shying at the light-heartedness of other art-stu- 
dents, — " Abner found it hard to countenance such fa- 
cetiousness in a world so full of pain." Abner's distrust 
of the sincerity of others was exposed time and again, 
just as was Mr. Garland's. 

I remember turning to Mr. Garland once, as we were 
passing what was then Hooley's Theatre in Chicago, 
and calling his attention to the fact that a play of 
Jerome K. Jerome's was to be seen there. 

" Ah," said Mr. Garland sadly, " do you think he is 
sincere ? " 

For the similar speech made to Richard Harding Davis, 
I cannot vouch, but it has long been current in print 
and out. 

" Why don't you," said the older man, reproachfully, 
to the author of Van Bibber, " dig deeper? " 

Mr. Fuller, on the same text, gave us a young painter, 
jeered at for painting Watteau marquises, saying to 
Abner: 



MEN AND MANNERS 235 

" I'll paint my next sitter as a milkmaid — if she'll let me." 
" As a milkmaid? " said Abner. " No; paint the milkmaid 

herself. Deal with the verities. Like them before you paint 

them. Paint them because you like them." 

Only the folk who prefer art jargon to art itself, who 
advertise sincerity without having it, can have found 
anything but delight in " Chevalier " Fuller's sketch of 
Abner Joyce. I cannot leave the subject without repeat- 
ing a story Mr. John McGovern was wont to tell at 
about the same time that he anticipated Dr. Osier's 
theory as to the uselessness of men over forty years of 
age. Mr. McGovern had gone further; he had voiced 
loudly the Spartan belief that all over forty should be 
killed. For these and many other reasons, you should 
remember Mr. McGovern, who worked many years for 
the welfare of the English language. Circumstances and 
Chicago kept his efforts futile; but if for nothing else 
than his impatience with the Abner Joyces of this world, 
as expressed in the following story, he deserved remem- 
brance : 

In the days before Mr. Garland came East from Chi- 
cago, bringing his hand-made laurels with him, Mr. Mc- 
Govern arose one morning with a dull, far-off noise 
haunting his hearing. " I heard someone," he said, 
" a-beating of a drum." He proceeded down town. To 
the accompaniment of the car-wheels there came again 
that rumbling, incessant sound, that someone " a-beating 
of a drum." He went to his newspaper office; still upon 
his ears fell that monotonous and endless droning. Still 
" someone was a-beating of a drum." Sadly, as one 
haunted, he went at last to a club much frequented by 
writers. And there, in the Press Club, concluded the trov- 
atore, 

" Was Hamlin Garland a-beating of his drum." 

Lest I be suspected, in my railing against ridiculous, 



236 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

impossible, and therefore inartistic, dialogue in literature, 
of accusing Americans out of all due proportion, let me 
hasten to say that English authors, attempting Ameri- 
can speech, have committed just as silly blunders. F. 
Frankfort Moore, for instance, in " According to Plato," 
a deadly tiresome effort to imitate the sparkle of Hichens 
and Shaw, once made an American girl say this : 

" I don't desiderate a civil war." 

Which, of course, whatever the man's position in the 
literary market-place may be, branded him as a bungler. 

There were plenty of cases like that, of stories pre- 
tending to be satires on American life, so stupidly unreal 
that only the most boundless ignorance on the part of 
the British publishers or public could ever have let them 
into print ; but to cite more instances would only tire all 
concerned. 

What I chiefly deduce is that this literary buncombe 
is of all vices the most harmful. The tendency to " write 
fine," which once led even so forthright a soul as Col. 
Henry Inman of Kansas, after beginning by declaring, 
in his own proper, plain speech, " I have been requested 
by several parties to offer something of Kit Carson's 
early days on the plains," into such stuff as " the bril- 
liant constellations of the incomparable June night, nurs- 
ing her through its silent watches," has spoilt many a 
book which, written naturally, might have been written 
well, and, " written fine," was an inartistic abomination. 
Call it buncombe ; or as did Mark Twain in his early, most 
jovial days, " hogwash " ; or " dictionary language " ; or, 
as I do, Top-hat Prose ; it is always the same thing, and 
always pestilent. 

Compared to it, the introduction of even the most slangy 
colloquialisms was a positive virtue. Not always were 
the colloquial accretions to our American language re- 
corded as deftly as by Henry James. Yet often in the 
most outrageous slang we had to admit literary possibili- 



MEN AND MANNERS 237 

ties. Sigh as we might, for instance, for the cloistral 
cadences of a Walter Pater, we had to admit, if we 
were normal human beings, the actuality, and so the art, 
of such pages as " Dooley " Dunne, and " Shorty Mc- 
Cabe " Ford, and " Artie " Ade, and " Billy Baxter " 
gave us. In all of this humorous slang the exact tone 
and thought of so many plain Americans was so caught 
and held, that these books had as much value for the 
philologist as for the lovers of laughter. 

Since the others are still very much with us — often 
too much so, indeed! — Wm. J. Kountz, Jr., is the only 
one of those distributors of slang whom I would ask you 
to remember particularly. All he ever wrote is in the 
slim ninety-page volume of " Billy Baxter's Letters," but 
that was so spontaneous, so vocal with what passes for 
wit with the American Man in the Street, that he should 
be added to the roll of American humorists. Mr. Kountz 
died before his booklet was cold. 

Whether such slang, such colloquialism, becomes lan- 
guage, or belongs to literature or not, of this I am sure ; 
it does no such harm as do the Hot-Mush talk of our 
fashionables and the Top-Hat Prose of our literary pre- 
tenders. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

' Against slang, and against dialect — against any de- 
parture from pure English, in fact — one man in America 
has constantly turned his face. He was the one com- 
manding figure in America in our time; the only Ameri- 
can, living in America, who was completely a man of let- 
ters, in the finest sense of that term, and who had writ- 
ten what his contemporaries, as well as posterity, must 
admit as masterpieces. 

His name is Ambrose Bierce.^ 

Time and again he inveighed against the " illiterate 
bumpkins " " who think they get close to nature by de- 
picting the sterile lives and limited emotions of the sod- 
hoppers that speak only to tangle their tongues," having 
special reference to the Mary Wilkinses, Mary Murfrees, 
James Whitcomb Rileys and Will Carletons. About 
dialect, as distinct from slang and the crimes against collo- 
quialism I have been pointing out, I do not mean to 
argue ; I leave it for a much pleasanter task ; giving Mr. 
Bierce his critical due. 

f It is easily possible that you have never heard of Am- 
brose Bierce. If your notion of American literature has 
been gained from perusal of the " best sellers " of the 
last quarter of a century or so, that is more than pos- 
sible. 

Ambrose Bierce, the only one of our men of letters 
sure to be heard of, side by side with Poe and Haw- 
thorne, when our living ears are stopped with clay, com- 
mitted, for most of his life, the fatal mistake of being, 
as well as a literary genius, a great journalist. The 
greatest satirist since Swift, or Pope, or Byron, he 
238 



MEN AND MANNERS 239 

lashed, in prose and verse, always the sinners rather than 
the sin. That, in this soda-fountain age of ours, was a 
cardinal offense in the eyes of those little sisters of the 
rich who say what American literature shall be. 

As journalist, Ambrose Bierce was the sole survivor 
from a period of great journalism. 

As a writer of short stories he towered above his gen- 
eration. When all our current letters are just where 
to-day the popular books of the 'Seventies and 'Eighties 
are, Ambrose Bierce's thin volume of stories " In the 
Midst of Life " will still be a great book ; no other Amer- 
ican book written in the last fifty years will survive so 
long. 

Upon that I stake my own critical reputation^/ 

Having said so much, as succinctly as I can, let me 
(supposing my reader to be one of those who have been 
blithely unconscious of our age and our land harboring 
a genius fit to rank with the other geniuses of recent 
times — with De Maupassant, with Verestchagin, and 
with Kipling) set down such adequate critical estimate 
of this great figure in American literature as is his 
due. 

I am well aware of Walter Blackburn Harte's fine 
monograph on Bierce in the " New England Magazine" 
of Boston, some fifteen years ago ; but I am equally well 
aware that just as that critic was never properly appre- 
ciated — which is something to which I shall presently call 
your special attention — so his monograph was but poorly 
circulated. 

I said that Bierce was a journalist. He survived, in- 
deed, from an age when we had such deserving the name. 
Before our newspapers became mere maws sucking in news 
and spewing it out, we had great personalities, and fine 
prejudices. Raymond, Greeley and Prentice were of that 
type ; in California were Frank Pixley and Ambrose 



240 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Bierce, who between them made the San Francisco Ar- 
gonaut into the best weekly paper on the continent. 
These were all men of strong personalities, strong preju- 
dices. What is, to-day, most the matter with both our 
literature and our journalism is that they are without 
either of those two vitalising qualities. Critically, as I 
cannot often enough point out, the impersonal manner is 
impossible in our present sophistication. That manner 
appeals only to the type of critic who is himself torn b}' 
doubts ; who harks back, always, to some dim hallucina- 
tion, compound of tottering judgment and of conven- 
tional views which, lazily adopted by such of his critical 
ancestors as were unoriginal, are now lumped together 
under the phrase classical; he calls this hallucination a 
Standard. 

Bierce, in journalism, always wielded hearty prejudices 
and discovered a vigorous personality. He was the jour- 
nalist whose every line is also literature. 

I do not forget the black eye the word journalist has 
long worn on our side of the water. One of the results 
of that indiscriminate hospitality to the incompetent 
which has for many decades marked our world of printer's 
ink, was that all amateurs, using the word in its more 
vulgar and corrupt sense, invariably called themselves, 
while they hung on to the fringes of newspaper life, 
journalists. So it came about that many of the real 
workers in the vineyard conceived a genuine hatred for the 
word. You may recall, however, that Rudyard Kipling, 
Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Chesterton have often been 
accused of being, rather than men of letters, glorified 
journalists. Ambrose Bierce may be mentioned in just 
that same breath, in just that same way. As a critic he 
always satisfied his prejudices, often recklessly; but how 
great was the journalism, the literature, that resulted! 

Do you think I confuse the terms? No; in criticism 
— and Bierce was essentially a critic, when he was not 
poet or tale-teller — the journalistic is the only manner 



MEN AND MANNERS 241 

that achieves results. The cloistered attitude in criticism 
is hopelessly futile. We write for the world we live in ; 
if we believe we write for another, the virtue is gone from 
us before we set pen to paper. Only in the vitality that 
comes from addressing with living lips a living audience 
has the thing itself any value. Adopt the academic, the 
impersonal; weigh all things fine in the scale of your 
knowledge of the past and your notion of posterity, — 
and the criticism you give birth to is as useful as a 
question mark or a stutter. 

The only domain of art into which it might be dan- 
gerous to extend this test is poetry. Mr. Bierce himself 
is loftily Parnassian on that point. The Parnassians be- 
come scornful if you suggest that between the world 
we live in, between the men and women next door to the 
room we inhabit, and the color of great poetry, there 
should be any correlation whatever; they would keep the 
matter and manner of true poetry entirely in the domain 
of dream-stuff. If, they say, poetry is to touch such 
stuff as you and I are made of, rather than such stuff 
as dreams are made of, why call it poetry? 

But on poetry I have ever confessed myself incompe- 
tent ; nothing guides me but an ear for music ; and that, 
they tell me, is not enough. I have always, at any rate, 
admitted that Ambrose Bierce was as masterful a critic 
of poetry as he was of life and literature in general. 
And on poetry he, in other directions so reckless in his 
prejudices, kept sternly to the most Parnassian principles, 
the severest laws of prosody, of form, and fancifulness. 

I find, since I am launched upon my consideration of 
Bierce as a journalist, that I am on the horns of a most 
discommoding dilemma. If I take it that most readers 
know little of the wonderful prose which Bierce expended 
so freely as a journalistic critic of men and things, I 
shall have to quote specimens ; and if I do that, you will 
see at once that it would be far better to read Ambrose 



242 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Bierce about everything and anything than this stuff of 
my own. Well — even if my book does no more than 
that, it will have done something. For in satiric prose 
there has been no such writer as Ambrose Bierce in our 
time, on either side of the Atlantic. 

Here is how Bierce once voiced that attitude of lash- 
ing always the sinner, not the sin, which brought him 
so many enemies : It is the same attitude which, by good 
fortune, I, in my lesser way, have been able to maintain, 
so that, to-day, lacking riches, I still have my self-respect. 
In reply to one who had accused him of being too much 
the misanthrope to be a fair critic, he said this : 

Does it really seem to you that contempt for the bad is 
incompatible with respect for the good? — that hatred of 
rogues and fools does not imply love of bright and honest 
folk? Can you really not understand that what is un- 
worthy in life or letters can be known only by comparison 
with what is worthy? He who bitterly hates the wrong is he 
who intensely loves the right; indifference to one is indif- 
ference to the other. Those who like everything love nothing; 
a heart of indiscriminate hospitality becomes a boozing ken 
of tramps and thieves. Where the sentimentalist's love leaves 
off the cynic's may begin. 

It would not be necessary, I think, to quote one other 
single line to prove, to any discriminating person, the sort 
of critic Bierce was, the sort of stuff he worked in. For 
years, upon the Pacific Coast, he was the terror of fools 
and rogues, in print and out. His satire played about 
many pigmies ; the pigmies are gone to the limbo they 
belonged to ; his satire remains. 

And here, I think, I had better set down some of the 
essentially pertinent features in Ambrose Bierce's life. 

Born in Ohio, in the early 'Forties, Ambrose Bierce 
came from people who had their ancestral roots in New 
England. This is important, as against those objectors 



MEN AND MANNERS 243 

who, when he pointed out some of our schoolbook in- 
accuracies anent the so-called War of 1812, accused him 
of being an Englishman. Even the date is important, in 
view of what the Christian Union wrote of him fifty 
years after. Which is too good a story to insert in this 
present bald biographic record; it must wait a little. 

He fought with the Army of the Cumberland, on the 
staff of General Hazen, leaving the army with the rank 
of Brevet Major. The importance in this is that, when 
he came to write the volume of " Tales of Soldiers and 
Civilians " (now called by its European title " In the 
Midst of Life ") he knew what he was writing about, — 
as Stephen Crane and others never did. 

But for a mere toss-up, Major Bierce, after the war, 
might have continued the military career for which his 
knowledge of strategy, of the theory and practise of war, 
as well as his physical presence, so admirably fitted him. 
The United States would have gained a general, but lost 
a great artist. He went to California, and from there, 
early in the 'seventies, to London, where he turned jour- 
nalist. Contributing to London Fun, in the days of the 
younger Hood, of George Augustus Sala, and of John 
Camden Hotten, the publisher, he there established him- 
self as a satirist and humorist in the first rank of those 
using pure English. This detail is to be remembered, 
as explaining something of London's literary apprecia- 
tion of the man. Also, you may see in what soil sprang* 
the roots of his journalistic career. 

Accomplished in journalism of the highest type, when 
he returned to California he soon beame a power. He 
superseded James T. Watkins on the San Francisco 
News Letter; he made that weekly, as he did the Wasp, 
memorable in the annals of personal journalism in 
America. With Frank Pixley he made the Argonaut. 
Gradually his personal fame and power were growing 
greater than any weekly paper could command ; William 
R. Hearst took him over to the San Francisco Ex- 



244 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

aminer, there to discourse of men and things in the de- 
partment entitled " Prattle." There, for years, were 
printed, every Sunday, the boldest expressions of personal 
opinion, in the purest English, that the criticism of our 
time has any record of. 

His books are not many, but all good. Small col- 
lections of the humor he had written in London over the 
signature of " Dod Grile " appeared as books there in 
the 'Seventies ; among them was one called " Cobwebs frorc 
an Empty Skull." These, I think, are out of print. 
They deserve memory, however, inasmuch as it was one 
of them which, lying on an old bookstall, enabled Mr. 
Gladstone to give one of the few exhibitions of good 
taste in reading which he ever displayed. Through the 
expression of his delight in " Dod Grile," Mr. Gladstone 
revived in London the identity of Ambrose Bierce, and 
started that appreciation of Bierce's war-stories whict 
rekindled our American regard of him. That one act — 
which is historic, and not merely anecdotic — should gc 
a little toward wiping out the crimes Mr. Gladstone, as 
a taster of general literature, was constantly commit- 
ting ; his helping the " Robert Elsmere " snow-ball on its 
way certainly needed a deal of wiping out. 

The book which will carry Bierce's name on to poster- 
ity was the collection of stories " In the Midst of Life.' : 
These tales had been printed first in newspapers. The 
newspapers, you see, have always been large in the storj 
of this great man of letters. They printed these, the 
finest gems of story-telling in English ; they had share ir 
enabling his satiric criticisms to reach the public; anc 
they had as great a share in preventing his literary 
genius being properly acknowledged in his own land anr 
time. The famous volume referred to was first publishec 
privately in San Francisco by a merchant named E. L 
G. Steele. His name deserves memory in any proper rec 
ord of American literature. A second collection of Bierce's 



MEN AND MANNERS 245 

stories of war and horror was printed as a book under 
the title " Can Such Things Be? " From G. A. Danziger's 
crude translation he made in " The Monk and the Hang- 
man's Daughter " a fine English version of Richard Voss's 
German novel. 

In his satiric prose these books are specimens : " Fan- 
tastic Fables" and "The Cynic's Word Book." In 
verse — a medium wherein he never pretended to work as 
other than a satirist on ephemeral men and matters ; yet 
in which he accomplished much that was true poetry — 
we have his " Black Beetles in Amber " and " Shapes of 
Clay." The best of his satire long lay buried in news- 
paper files. 

Before I come to that which already has assured him 
fame, his volume of short stories, let me, by further ex- 
tracts from the satiric prose which for years he expended 
through the impermanent medium of a newspaper, show 
what sort of critic he was. That will explain, too, some- 
thing of his career. You will see how, in our land alleg- 
edly of liberty and free speech, the entire American press 
could conspire to hamper the power and repute of a great 
critic who castigated always the fool rather than the 
folly, the knave rather than his knavishness. Whereso- 
ever a malefactor engaged Bierce's attention — whether 
the crime was again decent politics, against good citizen- 
ship, or against the English language — there resulted 
criticism that had intrinsic merit far beyond its text. 
Into that criticism went the vigorous opinion of a strong 
individuality, and the English of a great man of letters. 
If he dismayed the fools, he also helped the worthy. 
Many a reputation that we now consider established — 
as the fleeting reputations of our current letters go — 
owed its origin to Bierce. That detail should be remem- 
bered, since his enemies worked so hard so many years to 
make him out a deadly pessimist, a dealer in hateful per- 
sonalities. Whereas no person can reasonably read any 



246 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of his satire without finding therein, behind the apparent 
expression of strong prejudice, just such cold, clear rea- 
soning, such impeccable logic, as in his fiction had given 
his pages their wonderful touches of inevitable, relent- 
less tragedy. 

You have only to glance in the most careless way at 
the satire, in prose and verse, which Ambrose Bierce for 
so many years flung forth so recklessly, to see why, in 
an age of compromise, he was branded " Dangerous " by 
those who think they command our literature. Where 
all else was compromise, and time-serving, he spoke his 
mind, — a mind wherein were great ideals, of art and of 
humanity. His critical creed was most completely ex- 
pressed, I think, in some lines he once addressed " To a 
Censor." Him he accused thus : 

Against abstractions evermore you charge 
You hack no helmet and you need no targe. 
That wickedness is wrong and sin a vice, 
That wrong's not right and foulness never nice, 
Fearless affirm. All consequences dare; 
Smite the offense and the offender spare; 

Good friend, if any judge deserve your blame 
Have you no courage, or has he no name? 
Upon his method will you wreak your wrath, 
Himself all unmolested in his path? 

We know that judges are corrupt. We know 
That crimes are lively and that laws are slow. 

We know that lawyers lie and doctors slay; 
That priests and preachers are but birds of pray; 

That merchants cheat and journalists for gold 

Flatter the vicious while at vice they scold. 

Do you need other evidence of his calibre and his craft ? 
Do you wonder, that in this country of ours, with its 
hypocrisies, and its pandering to the popular on one hand 



MEN AND MANNERS 247 

and the plutocrats on the other, such a writer was a 
thorn in the majority's flesh? 

I have already referred to Bierce's standards for 
poetry. Those standards were often offended, and as 
often Bierce let loose the lightning of his wisdom and his 
wit. Especially was his impatience stirred by those who 
went about the country expounding the nature of poetry, 
without being themselves, by his criterion, poets. One of 
these was James Whitcomb Riley. There resulted a phi- 
lippic against the " Hoosier " versifier which bred for Mr. 
Bierce one of his largest arrays of enemies. " Poetry," 
wrote Bierce, " is not incompatible with lowly themes ; it 
may concern itself with the lives and sentiments, the deeds 
and emotions, of common people. Like the artist, the 
poet suffuses with a light that is not of earth whatever 
he touches. But the light is his light ; it does not inhere 
in the subject. (To speak understandingly of poetry 
one must speak in metaphor, as the poet speaks ; it is a 
thing to be felt, not defined.) Of this light Mr. Riley 
has not a gleam." He continued, thus : 

In the dirt of his " dialect " there is no grain of gold. 
His pathos is bathos, his sentiment sediment, his " homely 
philosophy " brute platitudes — beasts of the field of thought. 
. . . His humor does not amuse. His characters are stupid 
and forbidding to the last supportable degree; he has just 
enough of creative power to find them ignoble and leave them 
offensive. His diction is without felicity, his vocabulary is 
not English. . . . 

Do you wonder that this man made enemies? 

Well — if enemies will bring us such literature as Am- 
brose Bierce has given us, we should all pray to God for 
more of them! 

To one who, admitting him a consummate master of 
the language, had accused him of stamping on the face 
of his literary inferiors, he replied: 



248 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Is it unknown to you that this California of ours is one 
of the world's moral dark corners — that it is a happy hunting 
ground of rogues and dunces and such small deer, and that 
they are everywhere and always obstreperous, conspicuous, 
unscrupulous, dominant. Does it surprise and pain you that 
I find every year several scores of such, whom I deem de- 
serving of the treatment that you describe in so lively meta- 
phor? Can you not understand that the satisfaction I find 
in making enemies is a harmless satisfaction? And what ex- 
cellent enemies they are! They never tire, they never sleep; 
never for a moment anywhere do they forget. No scheme of 
revenge is too base for them, no lie too monstrous to set going 
and keep going. And how sedulously they cloak the scars 
upon their backs, which would betray their motive ! — how 
soberly they disclaim animosity, even affirm goodwill and 
admiration ! 

Yes, we may love him for his enemies ; we may even 
love his enemies for that they stirred him to such imper- 
ishable satire. They may have hindered his immediate 
reputation ; yet every stone they set in his path only 
helped build the temple of his future. 

When, fifteen years ago, a maladroit scribbler syndi- 
cated a fantastic account of Bierce's career throughout 
America, mentioning him as " personally one of the gen- 
tlest of men," who had doubtless been " embittered by his 
failures," the subject of his remarks said merely this: 

Without inquiring in what my failures have consisted, nor 
by what inspiration my biographer knows what it is that I am 
trying to accomplish in this little life, I will let that stand 
without comment; and carrying in my soul this touching pic- 
ture of a heart-broken cynic, glittering with tears in the con- 
sciousness that nobody but God loves him, yet smiling through 
his hair as he feels upon his chin the plash of other tears than 
his, I back away from that sacred scene, and bidding myself 
a silent farewell, fall first upon my knees, and then upon 
my fools. 

It was little wonder that when this man appeared for 



MEN AND MANNERS 249 

consideration as a great literary artist, rather than as a 
militant journalist, the enmities he had stirred up, in crit- 
ical circles, among newspaper men, and privately, should 
have done their best to fight him. Where there was not 
open animosity, there was naive ignorance. Of this latter 
the Christian Union, of April 30, 1892, gave the prime 
example. It said of his " Soldiers and Civilians," which 
they compared, for exactness and accuracy, to Meissonier 
or Detaille — metaphor well meant but badly mixed! — - 

There is always a sensation of individual pleasure in dis- 
covering a " new man " in fiction-writing. Here, if we mis- 
take not, is one. Ambrose Bierce is certainly a name un- 
known to fame. . . . 

There, kindly as was the intent, was the bitter truth. 
The man, fifty years of age, who for at least twenty years 
had been the greatest artist in English on our continent, 
was " unknown to fame." Yes ; so far, his enemies had 
been successful. But it is only contemporary reputation 
they can spoil; not fame. 

The word " fame," indeed, is one never properly to be 
spoken of men still living; it is one of the perquisites of 
posterity. 

At about the same time that the Christian Union was 
recording how ignorant the Atlantic Coast was of Amer- 
ica's one great literary genius, the London Chronicle 
was reviewing his book of stories to the extent of col- 
umns. Years afterward, when an awkward squadsman 
wrote a book called " The Red Badge of Courage," Amer- 
ican newspapers again exposed their ignorance or their 
malice; they praised that book out of all proportion to 
the debt it owed the Bierce book, which, in artistry, tow- 
ered so far above it. Indeed, if one wished to indict 
American newspapers on the score of their attitude to- 
ward literature, one need go no farther than the case of 
Ambrose Bierce. 



250 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

An equally illuminating chapter would be the one re- 
counting faithfully Bierce's experiences with publishers. 

What those experiences were you may gather, firstly, 
from the fact that the book which makes him famous 
was refused by every I publisher of importance, and, 
nextly, from this general summing-up of their commer- 
cial morality: 

What (wrote Ambrose Bierce, in " Prattle," one fine May 
day of 1892) is a publisher? One of the most famous defi- 
nitions affirms him to be a person who drinks champagne out 
of the skulls of authors. Naturally that is an author's defi- 
nition. The world has accepted it for its wit, with a mental 
reservation taking account of its probable untruth. Publish- 
ers having control of types and printing presses, and being 
thriftily addicted to the maintenance of magazines and other 
periodicals to affirm their virtues and acclaim their wares, have 
pushed themselves into public repute as a kind of beings in- 
dubitably superior to such sordid considerations as control the 
acts of merely human tradesmen — children of light, whose 
motives come of inspiration from Heaven, or are the natural 
outgrowth of a native nobility of soul fertilized by a generous 
desire to elevate the Hterary art. If authors have commonly 
indulged themselves in a different view of the matter after 
some little experience, they have not always taken the trouble 
to avow it, or, avowing it, to back up the avowal with facts in 
justification. To eminent authors — whose words would have 
most weight — the publishers have commonly made ample 
atonement for their early sins against them; and authors ob- 
scure, besides not having access to the world's ears and being 
prevented by publishers from reaching such ears as might 
be open to their objurgations, are popularly thought a pretty 
testy lot anyhow. So it occurs that of all who know pub- 
lishers best, themselves are the only persons bearing public 
witness of their works and ways. And, God bless them; how 
they lie ! 

Let it be understood that I write of book publishers only, 
and of them in a general way; of the genus, not of the few 
noble freaks due to what the evolutionists call accidental vari- 



MEN AND MANNERS 251 

ations. I fancy, too, that I write with some knowledge of 
the subject, both old and new, but the reader must fit me out 
with such an equipment of motives as may best meet his in- 
stinctive sense of the probabilities : I am hardly likely to state 
any facts giving him good ground for assumptions of per- 
sonal prejudice. With this confession to guard and guide 
him he must be a very erratic reader indeed — a constitutional 
and irreclaimable estray — if he permit me to mislead him. 

What, then, is a publisher? He is a person who buys of a 
small class of fools something which he sells to a large class 
of other fools. It is perhaps not surprising that he grows rich 
while the persons of whom he buys remain poor. The persons 
to whom he sells are not materially affected in fortune, for 
they buy but a little each; they are fools only in the sense 
of preferring worthless goods. Commonly he is a man of 
meagre education, having but little knowledge of what he buys 
and absolutely no more care for the interests of those pro- 
ducing it than a grain dealer for the interests of the farmer. 
Not so much; for the grain dealer knows that the bankrupt 
farmer may intermit production for a season while undergoing 
transformation to a tenant of his mortgagee, whereas the 
poorer an author becomes the more certainly and diligently 
he will make manuscript. In short, the transactions between 
author and publisher are on a purely commercial basis — that 
is to say, the one who has the whiphand of the situation 
" cinches " the other all he knows how. It would hardly be 
necessary to say this but for a vague notion in the public 
mind that the goods changing hands are of a character to 
refine and ennoble somewhat the relations between sellers and 
buyers, and if the latter had not from immemorable time pro- 
moted that erroneous view. Production of literature that is 
good for anything but to sell does somewhat refine and en- 
noble the producer doubtless, or, rather, perhaps, persons of 
refinement and nobility are somewhat more likely to produce 
it, but I do not think its purchase and publication is regarded 
by the angels as a means of grace for subduing the soul of 
the publisher to godliness and purging it of thoughts of theft. 

Let us see what an author may reasonably hope to get by 
concession of these gracious gentlemen if he prefer to follow 
the appointed order of things by publishing first and becoming 
" famous " afterward. (When comfortably famous, his name 



252 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

on the lips of every blackguard in the land, he may reverse 
the situation and bring publishers to his terms.) The " regu- 
lar " rate to unknown, obscure or only fairly popular authors 
is ten per cent, of the retail price of each book sold. Let us 
now inquire in what relation to the project of publication this 
places the two parties to the transaction. Journalism being 
the profession that is least unlike that of literature may fitly 
be chosen to supply the " standard of wages " for use here. 
Newspaper writers make from one thousand to ten thousand 
dollars a year; two thousand will serve our purpose well 
enough as the sum that a writer's time is worth. The most 
impetuous and prolific novelists with whom Heaven has had 
the goodness to bless us seldom bring forth more than one 
whelp at a time — produce more than one book a year is what 
I meant to say. 

The author of the book-to-be, then, may be considered to 
have risked two thousand dollars on it — to have put that sum 
into the enterprise. The publisher, venturing to print a small 
edition, puts in one-half that amount. Let us be liberal and, 
counting in expenses of distribution, advertising, etc., say an 
amount just equal. But in dividing the proceeds the pub- 
lisher takes out of every dollar ninety cents and hands over 
ten cents to the author. And then the good man executes 
upon the horn of him a lively fanfaronade in celebration of 
his generosity in consenting to exist. 

It is readily admitted that the cost of the manuscript to 
the author in time and labor is a matter with which the pub- 
lisher has nothing to do, and which cannot with advantage be 
considered. In the matter as to others our old friend the law 
of supply and demand puts in a claim to consideration. But 
inasmuch as his reign is not altogether despotic, as is shown 
in the arbitrary adoption of ten per cent, as the author's 
rightful share, it seems not entirely unreasonable to hope that 
some day an honest and intrepid publisher may defy the law 
of supply and demand, break through the iron traditions of 
the trade, and commending his soul to God give as much as 
eleven. 

I have always wondered why no publisher was able to 
refute that argument, which for logic, reasonableness and 



MEN AND MANNERS 253 

accuracy, has never been surpassed. The fact remains 
that, to this day, I have never heard the case for the 
defense put so that it would convince. 

On another occasion Bierce commented upon a state- 
ment, heedlessly made by a prominent publisher, that it 
was advisable for an author to have some calling other 
than literature. He pointed out that it had never been 
necessary for a publisher to have another trade than pub- 
lishing. 

While the general argument, as it stands above, is per- 
fect, and ranks with what Pope and Byron have said of 
cognate subjects, Bierce often returned to these muttons. 
In one place he wrote: 

Of the forty publishers connected by narrative with Ali 
Baba it is hardly probable that all were equal in enterprise 
and boldness; most likely some fine, rare soul, some "born 
leader of men," towered above his fellows in these particulars 
as a sandhill crane overlooks an even surface of ducks. And 
if in our day and generation he has any descendants, " heirs 
to his virtues, men of equal mind," I have the honor to flatter 
myself that I discovered them. . . . The reader may 
chance to remember a story . . . entitled " The Monk 
and the Hangman's Daughter." . . . My collaborator 
. . . recently offered it for publication to the . . . 
above mentioned descendants of Ali Baba's illustrious contem- 
porary. After due consideration and a correspondence spread- 
ing over several weeks they submitted their proposal and 
doubtless employed a brass band to celebrate the event. They 
proposed to print the book and put it on the market, re- 
couping themselves out of the first sales. Having made 
themselves whole the rest would be profit. They were willing 
to let the authors in on that — the said authors getting one- 
tenth of it ! It goes without saying that the accounts were to 
be kept by the publishers. They would apparently keep any- 
thing. 

Lest the matter wear quite too tragic a face — no more 



254 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

so, however, than it deserves ! — let me extract, by way 
of conclusion, one anecdote from the vast store in Bierce's 
buried " Prattle " : 

John Camden Hotten, the publisher (he wrote), who had 
given me a check, died of a pork pie in order to beat me out 
of the money. Knowing nothing of this, I strolled out to his 
house at Highgate the next morning, and on being told was 
inexpressibly shocked, for my check was worthless. There 
was a hope, however: the bank might not have heard; so, 
having pinched the body and ascertained that it was indubi- 
tably lifeless, I called a hansom cab and drove furiously bank- 
ward. Unfortunately my gondolier steered me past the Lud- 
gate station, in the bar whereof our Fleet Street gang of 
writers had a private table; so I disembarked for a mug of 
bitter. Unhappily, too, Sala, Tom Hood the younger and 
others of the scapegrace gang were in their accustomed 
places. I sat at board, and in the pride of my " scoop " re- 
lated the sad event. The deceased had not in life enjoyed 
our favor, and, I blush to say, we all fell to making question- 
able epitaphs on him. Of the dozens that we turned off I am 
able (for my sins) to recall but one. That was by Sala, and, 
like all the others, was writ in rhyme. It ran thus: 

" Hotten, 
Rotten, 
Forgotten." 

I should like to explain that the author of this glow- 
ing composition was not a good prophet. The late John 
Camden Hotten cannot wholly perish out of memory so 
long as his virtues survive him in his successors. 

Such, then, were some of the experiences and conclu- 
sions in one lifetime of intercourse with publishers. Not 
an ordinary lifetime, but that of the only man of letters 
America harbored in our time. 

What, then, may have been the experiences of lesser 
men in that arena which the newspapers conspire to pro- 



MEN AND MANNERS 255 

claim as full of honors and riches — to be had almost for 
the asking? 

I shudder in contemplating this matter. Only the 
other day, in the summer of 1908, the metropolitan news- 
papers reported the case of a woman who, essaying liter- 
ature, had been swindled out of her savings by no less 
than four successive firms of so-called publishers. But 
that was doubtless a case as exceptional — she being evi- 
dently of the type of authors better left unprinted! — as 
are those cases of the fortunes acquired by the " best 
selling " novelists. 

The experience of Walter B. Harte was typical of the 
average obscure author's. His book of essays, as fine 
specimens of really fine art in writing as anything pro- 
duced within living memory, never — so he once confessed 
to me — brought him in one cent. The Arena Company 
of Boston, which published it, cannot be said to have 
done anything else but print it ; " published " is too 
large a word. The tragic remnant of the edition lay in 
Harte's attic for years before his death. 

To go into exact particulars, let me cite the experi- 
ence of one other obscure writer. 

Some nine books are to his credit. For these, how- 
ever, since in two cases he had new editions, he had eleven 
publishing firms. 

In only two cases did he make enough to pay, at the 
lowest day-wages, for his time or his typewriting. In 
those two cases the books were sold outright, for cash. 

Contrast those two cases, with those in which royalty 
contracts figured, and you will perceive an illuminating 
moral. Only one of the contracting publishers ever made 
either payments or statements of account; it is perhaps 
needless to say that he failed in business. 

Out of the sum of all the publishers encountered, per- 
haps three were, in their intentions, at least, honest gen- 
tlemen. 



256 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

If the matter in these books had not already brought 
their author a tiny income through serial publication, 
the time spent in their production would have been sheer 
waste. What the publishers made, it has never been 
possible to discover; their accounts are too well 
" kept." 

Finally, let it be noted that this same author had 
two plays produced. Out of those he made more than 
from all his nine books. 

Harsh enough are the things that have been said of 
those who rule the American theatre. What, then, shall 
be said of the rulers of our literature? 

If — by the way — you care for that obscure author's 
name, I could send it to you. 

The greatest journalist, and the greatest tale-teller in 
America, Ambrose Bierce, was also the only man who 
might have written that which our language has never 
had, a grammar. 

I do not forget Richard Grant White and the others. 
But I repeat that, if ever a publisher, in our time or 
another, issues the Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce,* 
those volumes will contain more than enough evidence in 
support of my contention. I even incline to the belief 
that if you cannot find such evidence in the brief extracts 
I have here made, you are so dull that I shall be sorry 
to have taken your money. 

Whether as satirist, as grammarian — as an artist, in 
short, using the English language — Ambrose Bierce will 
reach posterity or not may be discussed; but that his 
short stories have assured him fame, is as certain as that 
Flaubert and Baudelaire are famous. 

Mention of Baudelaire brings, of course, this thought: 

* Since this was written, publication of the " Collected Works of 
Ambrose Bierce" has begun in a Limited Edition. 



MEN AND MANNERS 257 

Just as he achieved from the super-American art of Ed- 
gar Allan Poe some great artistry of his own; just as 
Lafcadio Hearn turned Gautier's exquisite " Avatar " 
into equally exquisite English; so might a clever French- 
man, or German, or Italian, lay hold on fame's fringes 
by adequately translating the stories of Bierce. For he 
is of that great company of artists who, whatever coun- 
try they may have belonged to by birth or residence, be- 
longed in the last analysis to no country whatever. Wal- 
ter Frewen Lord said of Poe that " his stories were writ- 
ten by an American citizen ; but they might have been 
written by anybody." That could not justly be said of 
Bierce. Though his art, as art, was exotic to the rest of 
American art ; yet it could not have been written by any- 
body; nobody who had not fought through the Amer- 
ican Civil War could have written " Tales of Soldiers and 
Civilians." 

As a critic Bierce wrote of short-story art as one hav- 
ing authority; he ever reckoned it superior to the novel. 
That argument he clinched by his own short stories. 
Having chosen the form which he had so oft declared 
the superior in fiction, he proceeded to produce, in that 
form, the finest gems which, in our time, our language 
knew. Yet, in 1908, Hamilton W. Mabie — one of the 
typical deans having in charge our literary parochial- 
isms — after admitting that the short-story is probably 
the oldest literary form, and one of the most vital, gave 
in what purported to be a collection of " typical Amer- 
ican and English Tales " no place to Bierce, beside Poe 
and Hawthorne, but to James Lane Allen, William Aus- 
tin and Owen Wister ! ! ! 

I have said, time and again, that where a novel lacked 
style, and taste, where it was mere reporting, it was 
worthless, and that such worthlessness was our average. 
Bierce went further. In his argument for that form of 
art which he himself has used to such splendid ends, he 
wrote: 



258 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Not only is the novel ... a faulty form of art. but 
because of its faultiness it has no permanent place in litera- 
ture. In England it flourished less than a century and a half, 
beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, since 
whose death no novels, probably, have been written that are 
worth attention; though as to this one cannot positively say, 
for of those written only a few have been read by competent 
authority. The French novel, too, and the German are as 
dead. ... In Russian literature the novel still has some- 
thing of vitality, for it is still young, new, " novel." That in 
all these literatures novels are still produced in suspicious 
abundance and read with fatal acclaim is nothing to the pur- 
pose; I am speaking of the novel as a work of art, whereas 
the novel of to-day has no art broader and better than that 
of its individual sentences — the art of style. 

He continues : 

Among the other reasons why the novel is both inartistic 
and impermanent is this — it is mere reporting. True, the re- 
porter creates his events and characters, but that itself is a 
fatal objection, placing it on a plane distinctly inferior to 
that of history. Attention is not long engaged by what 
could but did not occur to individuals ; and it is a canon of 
the trade that nothing is to go into the novel that might not 
have occurred. Probability — which is but another name for 
the commonplace — is its keynote. When that is transgressed, 
as in the great fiction of Scott and Hugo, the work is ro- 
mance, another and superior thing, addressed to higher 
faculties with a more imperious insistence. The singular in- 
ability to distinguish between the novel and the romance is 
one of criticism's capital ineptitudes. It is like that of a 
naturalist who should make a single species of the squirrels 
and the larks. Equally with the novel, the short story may 
drag at each remove the lengthening chain of probability, 
but there are fewer removes. The short story does not, at 
least, cloy attention, confuse with overlaid impressions and 
efface its own effect. 

Great work has been done in novels. That is only to say 
that great writers have written them. But great writers may 
err in their choice of literary media, or it may occur that 



MEN AND MANNERS 259 

an author of genius is more concerned for gain than ex- 
cellence — for the nimble popularity that comes of following a 
literary fashion than for the sacred credentials of renown. 
The acclamation of the multitude may be sweet in his ear, 
the clink of coins grateful to his purse. To their gift of 
genius the gods add no security against its misdirection. I 
wish they did. I wish they would enjoin its diffusion in the 
novel, as for so many centuries they did by forbidding the 
novel to be. And what might we not have had from Virgil, 
Dante, Tasso, Camoens and Milton if they had not found the 
epic poem ready to their misguided hands? May there be 
in Elysium no bed of asphodel and moly for its hardy in- 
ventor, whether he was Homer or " another man of the same 



Which is surely very closely reasoned. The closing 
reference to the epic poem I had, I must admit, forgotten, 
until I found it again in my files just now; I had not 
thought Bierce had ever come so close to my own notion 
that poetry is lyric or it is nothing. But mine, as I have 
said before, are but the notions of a fanciful person ; 
Bierce's are the deductions of cold logic. 

Just as the newspapers, who had given him his main 
avenues into print, conspired to retard the renown of 
Ambrose Bierce, so the Hamilton Mabies of our time 
long pretended ignorance of his being the only man of 
genius in America writing short stories. 

But his thin little volume, " In the Midst of Life "— 
let me call it, from now on, by the title which, first used 
for the European edition, has now superseded the " Tales 
of Soldiers and Civilians " on this side of the water also 
— will be alive when the Hamilton Mabies are " of the 
missing." 

In this book of his, on which his fame must largely 
depend, there were but nineteen stories. 

The grimmest of subjects combined with psychologic 



260 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

analysis of the clearest. The method of realism, a style 
as pure as crystal, went with imaginative vision of the 
most searching, and the most radiant. Death, in warfare, 
and in the horrid guise of the supernatural, was painted 
over and over. Man's terrors in the face of such death 
gave the artist the cue for his wonderful physical and 
psychologic microscopies. You could not pin this work 
down as realism, or as romance ; it was the great human 
drama — the conflict between life and death — fused through 
genius. Not Zola in the endless pages of his " Debacle " 
had ever painted War more faithfully than any of the 
war stories in this book ; not De Maupassant had invented 
out of war's terrible truths more dramatically imagined 
plots. The very color and note of war itself are in those 
pages. There painted an artist who had seen the Thing 
Itself, and being a genius, had made of it art still greater. 
I do not hesitate to say that " In the Midst of Life " 
may live when all other memories of the American Civil 
War are gone. 

Death was the closing note of every one of the ten 
stories of war in this book. The brilliant, spectacular 
death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson 
hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his " Charge of 
the Light Brigade " ; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drug- 
ging death by hanging ; the multiplied, unspeakable death 
that fills the fields where battles passed; the death that 
comes from sheer terror — death actual and imagined — 
every sort of death was in these pages, so painted as to 
make Pierre Loti's " Book of Pity and of Death " seem 
but feeble fumbling. 

Which brings the thought: Whatever else Bierce's 
detractors allowed him, they never admitted that he was 
human in his art. If you want to spoil your sleep o' 
nights, they shrugged, read him if you like ; but the man 
is absolutely without heart. Against that I always re- 
member the closing of his story of that amazing, foolish 
charge undertaken by " A Son of the Gods " : 



MEN AND MANNERS 261 

The skirmishers return, gathering up their dead. 

Ah, those many, many needless dead ! That great soul 
whose beautiful body is lying over yonder, so conspicuous 
against the sere hill-side — could it not have been spared the 
bitter consciousness of a vain devotion? Would one excep- 
tion have marred too much the pitiless perfection of the 
divine, eternal plan? 

His own words, it is true, may patly be used for his 
own tale-telling genius : it had an almost pitiless perfec- 
tion. The very face of war was painted as no other, 
save only Verestchagin, had painted it; the human soul 
in agony was exposed relentlessly; the sense of drama 
was paramount ; for any pity that might mar the picture 
or the drama there was no more room than in Nature 
herself. No dramatist ever used the values of surprise 
more effectively than Bierce. Rarely, until the very last 
sentence, does he give you the illuminating heart of the 
mysteries he has made so dreadful and so fascinating. 
That applies to his stories <of more or less supernatural 
horror, as well as to his war stories. 

" Soldiers " and " Civilians " still head the two sec- 
tions in " In the Midst of Life," and if you say " war 
stories " and " ghost stories " you come fairly near the 
truth. In the war stories he was not only a pioneer, but 
he blazed a path where few may follow; the fact that 
Stephen Crane, attempting that path, reached a sort of 
passing notoriety, has bearing only on the history of our 
criticism, not of literature. . In his ghost stories we may 
mention in the same breath only De Maupassant. Much 
as the art of Bierce has been compared to that of Edgar 
Allan Poe, it is not properly comparable to that at all — 
save as being great art in great English — as his treat- 
ment of the ghost-story will prove. (In war-stories, as 
I have said, he had neither forerunner nor peer.) Both 
Poe and Theodor Hoffmann were genuine romantics ; but 
they cared little for form. Poe was the more awe-inspir- 
ing of the two; Hoffmann had what Poe lacked: humor. 



262 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

In psychology, and in humor, Bierce approaches Hoff- 
mann ; but in brevity, in definite sense of form, De Mau- 
passant is his only rival. Nearly all the other great 
artists who worked this vein, used subjective psychology; 
Bierce's was ever severely objective. You have only to 
read that wonderful story " The Suitable Surroundings " 
to see that. Hoffmann's stories were all mere variations 
on his own image and his moods ; Poe's expressed this or 
that bitterness of soul or mind ; but in Bierce's stories 
you get no glimpse of a personality. This art, and this 
prose, was absolutely impersonal; it was relentless as 
Fate, as perfect and as purposeless as the diamond. 

No greater indictment of the publishing fraternity in 
America is possible than is in the line Ambrose Bierce 
wrote, in 1891, on the fly-leaf of this book: "Denied 
existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, 
this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, 
of San Francisco." 

Had there been in it nothing else than the ten war- 
stories it had deserved fame. The ghastly description of 
the battlefield after " Chickamauga " may survive mem- 
ory of the battle itself. Nothing in the horrible possi- 
bilities of civil war is more dramatic than " The Affair 
at Coulter's Notch," wherein an officer of artillery has 
to train his guns upon a house which shelters his own 
wife and child. 

Briefly, if but one volume written in America in our 
time is to survive for the perusal of future centuries, 
that volume is " In the Midst of Life." 

If of Bierce's realism and romance, the range of his 
imagination and the accuracy of his eye, the depth of 
his philosophy and the sureness of his style, you can get 
little notion unless you actually read his stories ; so can 
I not hope adequately to acquaint you with all that he 
has done for satire, for poetry, and for the very Ian- 



MEN AND MANNERS 263 

guage. I have tried to show something of his theory of 
the short-story, as well as his triumphs therein. I have 
quoted fragments of his satiric style; yet I can hardly 
have done more than whet the appetite of the gourmet. 
I have shown what were the publishing experiences of 
this one genius in American letters. Several matters still 
remain : his poetry and his influence on poetry are among 
them. 

As an influence on American poetry Bierce emerged 
into general notice on more than one occasion. It was 
he who from the first had given Edwin Markham the 
encouragement that made him keep courage to remain a 
poet. When publication of " The Man with the Hoe " 
swept this continent like a prairie fire, Bierce withdrew 
his approbation ; the poem made for immediate no- 
toriety, but eventually it made for Markham's decline. 
From being a poet, he became a lecturer. He lectured, 
in print and out, about poetry and about socialism ; but 
he became more demagogue than artist. That same 
spirit in him which had caused him to voice the people's 
wrongs, and bade him pray his fellow poets to send forth, 
in song, " a tempest flinging fire upon the wrong," surged 
in him so strongly that the purpose of his art grew 
greater than the art itself. He, who had sung of Truth 
that it is enough 



If we can be a bugle at her lips, 
To scatter her contagion on mankind 



became in later years so militant with purpose, so unsat- 
isfied with poetry for merely poetry's sake, that it was 
little wonder that Bierce, with his passionately severe 
formula for poets, would have no more of him. 

More recently Bierce threw down the gauntlet to con- 
temporary opinion by affirming that a young poet, 
George Sterling, had in a poem called " Wine of 



264 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Wizardry " proven himself " incomparably the greatest 
poet that we have on this side of the Atlantic." Into 
the controversy that followed I do not mean to enter 
here; I cannot sufficiently insist that poetry must be 
beyond my proper appreciation, since I am content, in 
the matter of rhymed stuff, if it goes musically. I never, 
for instance, saw anything in Sterling's work which came 
up to these stanzas, surely as vigorous as any in Kip- 
ling's " Recessional " and surely, also, more loftily put : 

God of my country and my race ! 

So greater than the gods of old — 

So fairer than the prophets told 
Who dimly saw and feared thy face, — 

To whom the unceasing suns belong, 
And cause is one with consequence, — 
To whose divine, inclusive sense 

The moan is blended with the song, — 

Whose laws, imperfect and unjust, 
Thy just and perfect purpose serve; 
The needle, howsoe'er it swerve, 

Still warranting the sailor's trust, — 

God, lift thy hand and make us free 
To crown the work thou hast designed, 
O, strike away the chains that bind 

Our souls to one idolatry ! 

Give thou or more or less, as we 

Shall serve the right or serve the wrong. 
Confirm our freedom but so long 

As we are worthy to be free. 

But when (O, distant be the time!) 

Majorities in passion draw 

Insurgent swords to murder Law, 
And all the land is red with crime; 



MEN AND MANNERS 265 

Or — nearer menace ! — when the band 

Of feeble spirits cringe and plead 

To the gigantic strength of Greed, 
And fawn upon his iron hand; — 

Nay, when the steps to state are worn 
In hollows by the feet of thieves, 
And Mammon sits among the sheaves 

And chuckles while the reapers mourn; 

Then stay thy miracle ! — replace 

The broken throne, repair the chain, 
Restore the interrupted reign 

And veil again thy patient face. 

Those lines are picked out as typical; yet, even so, 
they give but a faint notion of the whole poem, which is 
an " Invocation " written by Ambrose Bierce just twenty 
years ago for Independence Day. The poem is hidden 
away in the nearly 400 pages of the volume " Shapes of 
Clay," wherein, as in the other collected verses, " Black 
Beetles in Amber," the multitude of his enemies is pickled 
for posterity. You have only to open those volumes 
anywhere to marvel at his dexterity in rhymed satire. He 
never pretended to be a poet ; he disclaimed ever having 
written any poetry. Yet, if his " Invocation " is not 
poetry, then is not the " Recessional " poetry either. ^ 
only ask the fair-minded to decide for themselves. My\ 
own dilemma is peculiar enough: I believe in Bierce's 
judgment of poetry, and he has said he is not a poet. 
If I must differ with him on anything, it would be about 
that. 

JrMy Case is nearly concluded. It culminates with Am- 
brose Bierce. The sort of rubbish that has constituted 
the average of that abundant production with which we 
were told to be satisfied, you have seen ; and now you see 
the stone the builders of our literary temple so reluc- 



266 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

tantlj accepted: Ambrose Bierce. Between those gulfs 
of taste — the mediocrity we permitted and the one man 
of genius we long tried to deny — American literature is 
in a state more parlous than in that time when England 
asked who read an American book. 

That is the Case. 

The Blame lies with our lack of any criticism deserv- 
ing the name. That lack includes the newspapers. 

But before I come to the general arraignment of our 
uncritical conditions, let me emphasise again how they 
affected the career of Ambrose Bierce. Although news- 
papers first printed most of what he wrote, even to the 
most precious gems of his literature, it was the news- 
papers also, snarling back under the lashes of his satire, 
who did their best to hinder his renown, i Allied with 
them was that pseudo-critical crew which, unfortunately 
for American letters, has so long been dominant on the 
Atlantic Coast. My friend, William Marion Reedy, that 
Missouri amalgam of Rochefort and Gambetta, exploded, 
not long ago, our " Myth of a Free Press." The case 
of Ambrose Bierce— quite aside from the larger indict- 
ment I mean presently to bring — is quite enough to dis- 
sipate that dream still more thoroughly. What, more 
than anything, our so-called criticism was never able to 
imagine was that Bierce — or any other honest man — laid 
on so heavily with his satire with any other object than 
the satisfying of a personal grudge. Our national dis- 
honesty, incapable of rightly interpreting a critical cam- 
paign for artistic principles, refused to believe that a 
man might love you as a brother, while cordially con- 
demning your work; or might consider you a despicable 
rogue while admiring your art. 

Knowing this, having experienced it many a time, 3> 
mean to be beforehand with those amateurs of obvious- 
ness who will try to wave away my appreciation of 
Ambrose Bierce, man of letters, with the suggestion that 
Ambrose Bierce, the man, is evidently one of my friends, 



MEN AND MANNERS 267 

They are quite right : I have that honor. It has noth- 
ing whatever to do with the case, but it is quite true. 
Years after I began to proclaim publicly my admiration 
of the writer's art, I made the man's acquaintance. We 
have broken bread together, gone journeys together, 
lived under the same roof. All of which — though it had 
no bearing whatever on my opinion of his art — I have 
counted as a bright interlude in a somewhat monotonous 
chain of critical and personal experiences. 

Very early in my critical work I found that to come 
into personal relations with authors was the most fatal 
of mistakes ; they are quite as hopelessly as politicians 
and newspapers given to the belief that if my friend does 
a silly thing I must say it is a clever thing. So, what 
with the safety of it, and my not happening, in any 
event, to be a sociable animal, I kept as clear as possible 
of men who wrote. It prevented disaster and disenchant- 
ment. In a passive sense, of course, my course did not 
make for profit. In an age wherein the man who studies 
" office politics " more than the art of English succeeds in 
journalism and in supplying " best-sellers," the man who 
keeps himself remote, who merely writes of life and let- 
ters as he sees them, as honestly and as artistically as 
he can, is very likely to be left in the secluded society 
of himself. That risk, then, I ran cheerfully ; if I kept 
but a small company of friends, the large phalanx of 
my enemies constantly assured me of my value in the 
world; and I kept, above all else, my conscience clean, 
and my critical judgment unaltered by friendships or by 
hates. I could name, I think, in two minutes, all the 
writers I have known in person ; but — I thank my for- 
tune Ambrose Bierce was one of them. 

Withdrawal from the world of " office politics " re- 
lieved me, even as a critic of letters, from the need of 
adding others to the list of the unnecessary fools even 
the worst of us accumulates. The many mediocre writers 
whom I have been forced to read, I have never, praise be, 



268 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

had to lay eyes on. But that I have known, as man, one 
great genius in American literature is something I shall 
ever be thankful for. To have known such a man of 
letters, more than atones for my never having moved 
much in what I suppose is called " literary society." 
Nothing more astonishes the provincial than your admis- 
sion that you do not know So-and-so, the novelist who 
makes ten thousand a year; you at once fill him with sus- 
picion that as a critic you must be a fraud. He has 
read in the papers that So-and-so has a house-party at 
his new palace-by-the-sea, built from the proceeds of his 
newest novel ; and he supposes, of course, that you were 
among those present. Well, though I have never known 
the persons who have amassed riches and renown by sell- 
ing what people most wanted, I shall sleep just as well 
o' nights. But with Ambrose Bierce I have discussed 
men and things ; we have fought as often as we have 
agreed ; — notably on the art of painting I deprecate 
his views ; and as to music, I am convinced that he has 
no ear ! — I have walked with him, step by step, over those 
battlefields of Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain 
which he fought on and wrote of ; and, in fine, if any 
ever ask me, now or hereafter: 

" Have you known a Man of Letters ? " 

I can say: 

" Yes : Ambrose Bierce." 

Admitted, then, that I have been his friend. 

What of it? 

If he did work I thought unworthy, was our friend- 
ship to prevent my saying so? Because he became my 
friend, was I to call all his geese swans? The thing is 
too ridiculous. I would not mention it, did I not know 
the petty misdemeanors of our critical crew, the littleness 
of their minds, which cannot fancy in others the virtues 
they themselves lack. If I myself have done bad work, 
and my enemy in censuring me himself achieves a bit of 



MEN AND MANNERS 269 

fine art, shall I not admire it? There is no logic in such 
reasoning; no logic and no honesty. If American criti- 
cism had, to-day, honesty, good taste, and logic, our liter- 
ature would not be so like a crowded rabbit warren. 

Let me conclude, then, my appreciation of Ambrose 
Bierce. In satire he was a giant ; in short-stories a 
genius. Look but slightly into his " Cynic's Word Book " 
and you will find the grammarian, and the artist in Eng- 
lish. I began my review of him with mention of his con- 
cern for our language •/ 1 can close it by reiterating that 
no man in our time did more for English than Ambrose 
Bierce. 

Equally, none did greater harm to English literature 
than our critics and our newspapers.^ 



PART THREE 
CRITICISM 



CHAPTER ONE 

So paramount, in our time, has been the influence of 
the newspapers in forming the people's opinion, in both 
material and artistic affairs, that criticism in America 
can hardly be said to have existed outside of the daily 
press. With the passing of a healthy and honest 
weekly press, the entire absence of proper prejudice and 
personality, criticism, adequately deserving the name, 
has become so insignificant as to be typic of an amazing 
national condition: a huge democracy, believing in the 
myth of a free press, and dominated by that press just 
as tyrannously as by any of the other so-called trusts. 

For our present taste in letters, then, the American 
newspaper is primarily to be held responsible. 

William Archer, pointing out, not long ago, how bale- 
fully the novel was the " dominant art-form " of our 
time, declared that " the novelists whose works a man 
of intelligence feels bound to read may easily be counted 
on the five fingers." On our side of the water, things 
were even worse. With either literature or intelligence 
our flood of " best-selling books " had nothing to do ; 
publishers seemed to publish only because their advertise- 
ments had started a sort of craving in the public — a dis- 
ease, like dipsomania, or cocaine. Ours was a fictional 
debauch. What with the greed of publishers and au- 
thors, the ignorance of the public, and the venality of 
the newspapers, the American national intelligence was 
threatened vitally. That the novel is of all art-forms 
the cheapest, and permits the greatest fools to essay it, 
there can be no denying. What had been typical in 
novel-production I have tried to show ; in the higher forms 
273 



274 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of literary art, especially in criticism, we had hardly any- 
thing. Certainly not if the newspapers could help it. 

The newspapers failed to correct the national ten- 
dency toward dishonesty. Themselves guilty of time- 
serving, of compromise, and of no morality at all save 
what might cater to the greatest possible number, they 
could not hope to have any effect of meliorism on a 
people who judged right and wrong only by the stand- 
ard of success. 

First, however, let me preamble a little, by declaring 
that I know well enough that honest men enter the news- 
paper profession. But I have no hesitation in declar- 
ing that it seldom lets them stay honest. 

The workman becomes subdued, eventually, to what he 
works in. Let a youth of ever so fine a moral and men- 
tal code enter upon the profession of journalism, and I 
doubt if his moral fibre would survive three years. I do 
not mean, here, to invade the subject which William 
Marion Reedy took in his pamphlet on " The Myth of a 
Free Press " ; but there are some individual experiences 
of my own which should be set down. 

The newspaper man is no longer the pariah he was 
once considered. We do not need long memories to re- 
call the time when the legend of the writing man's drunk- 
enness had its basis in fact. One of the honestest crew 
of men I ever came in contact with were the newspaper 
men of Chicago in the years just before the Columbian 
Exposition ; but when a certain cure for drunkenness be- 
gan to prove occasionally efficacious nearly every news- 
paper in town sent half the staff down to be experimented 
on. One of these cures was situated in an Illinois village 
named Dwight, and in current jest the Press Club of 
Chicago was dubbed the Dwight Annex. 

In any chronicle of literary conditions, going back as 
far as the end of the nineteenth century, that Press Club 
deserves mention, since, with the old Bohemian Club of 



CRITICISM 275 

San Francisco, it harbored men who really wrote Eng- 
lish, who were not butchers, bankers, and brokers. A 
membership of the latter worthies has enabled many a 
so-called press club in America to build itself snug quar- 
ters ; but it never brought them near the kingdom of 
literature. 

Working in the most happy-go-lucky conditions some 
of those writers, marooned, to all intents and purposes, 
on that barren coast of Middle-Western culture, were as 
genuine in their aspirations, and often as worthy in their 
achievements, as was ever any band of artists, whether 
of Barbizon or Concord. The Atlantic Coast, in its ar- 
rogance, would have none of them. Their own town was 
unconscious of their existence. Yet they went on, good 
newspaper men, and good writers, for the sake of " das 
Ding fuer sich," rather than the steak-and-ale at Billy 
Boyle's, or the game of poker, or the all-night carousals 
of the Whitechapel Club. 

They loathed sham, and hated snobs. The age of 
great men owning newspapers was not yet gone by; 
Joseph Medill still lived. Elwyn Barron and " Teddy " 
McPhelim wrote criticism of the drama that should have 
lived longer than that drama itself. The aesthetic and 
literary aspirations of a well-meaning plutocrat, Hobart 
Taylor, were publicly lampooned by the Whitechapel 
Club, which nominated him for Mayor. 

Eugene Field had his local Maecenas, and his Eastern 
publishers. " Chevalier " Fuller, one of America's few 
stylists, and Ernest McGaffey, one of its few poets, also 
had publishers elsewhere; Chicago neither published nor 
read. That in such an atmosphere so many good men 
went on with their business of honestly writing as best 
they could, is one of the most amazing things in all lit- 
erary history. For, if the periods of Pfaff's in New 
York, and of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, be- 
long to any proper history of American literature, so 
does the period I write of. 



276 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Elsewhere I have mentioned Hamlin Garland, and 
John McGovern. The former represented the attitudes 
and the advertisements which our paramount conditions 
have usually demanded as hostages to success. The lat- 
ter was of the humbug-hating, forthright type which, re- 
maining perhaps, in the last analysis, Chicago obscur- 
ities, nevertheless were honest writers and honest Amer- 
icans. Indeed, we could easily pursue the argument be- 
yond mere literature ; it has ever been the American of 
the interior who has been the only one deserving the 
name. We may deplore the mental indolence which has 
let him follow, in the arts, fallacious idols ; but the guilt 
of that has ever been with the newspapers ; he himself has 
never so debased the true coin of taste and honesty as 
have the pseudo-aristocrats and the aliens of the metrop- 
olis. 

Of Stanley Waterloo's novel " A Man and a Woman " 
you may never have heard. Quality never had aught to 
do with results ; it is only the noise of the advertise- 
ments that compels attention. I do not say it was a 
great book; but it was quite as good as any of the 
stories writ large in your favorite newspaper. As for the 
same writer's short story " The Dog and the Man," in 
grim satire and general technique, few of our writers have 
surpassed it. 

About Opie Read, the work he did, the figure he cut, 
and the man he was, it were easy to write a book. He 
is renowned enough ; in the West his reputation as nov- 
elist towers far beyond that of any touted " best seller " ; 
but by the literary " powers that be " he has always been 
ignored. His short stories, about the " Arkansaw Trav- 
eler " and similar subjects, are gems of natural spon- 
taneous writing ; they belong with Mark Twain's " Jump- 
ing Frog " story, and other essentially American native 
products. The list of his novels, with " A Kentucky Col- 
onel " at the head of them, is long — too long for fine art, 
but not too long to display a great natural, profuse 



CRITICISM 277 

talent. The man was a born tale-teller; style he cared 
nothing for; his was the genius for improvisation which 
was Homer's and the other great improvisers. 

Of another artist, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater declared 
that his writing always had the quality of a good talker; 
the same was true of Opie Read; he wrote, as he talked, 
fluently, almost garrulously, with wonderful fertility, 
restless invention. From his sofa in the Press Club he 
could tell stories literally by the hour; they were better 
than anything he wrote, though that was entertaining 
enough. That such a man, pouring out stories, novels, 
and plays, — appearing as a public entertainer even from 
the public platform — should not have equaled the na- 
tional renown of a Mark Twain or a Joaquin Miller, is 
one of the mysteries of Luck. Others, too, have had the 
vagrom temperament, yet have been recognised as great 
men. Chicago, and circumstances, conspired to give Opie 
Read, for all his opulently outpoured talents, little save 
what payed his poker debts. 

It is, this case of Opie Read's, so far-reaching, that I 
find it hard to leave it. His novels were published mostly 
in paper, and sold on Western trains. In that form our 
Eastern publishers and public have never been able to 
conceive literature. Ten years or so ago, when some 
ambitious firms in Boston and Chicago tried to emulate 
the European device of printing beautiful books in artis- 
tically decorated paper, they failed dismally; the public 
could not be convinced that real books might appear in 
something else than the hard wooden boards of conven- 
tion. Even to-day — when one would suppose millions of 
traveled Americans, who buy the Tauchnitz editions in 
Europe, to be convinced of real literature being possible 
outside of " cloth " bindings — an American book issued 
in paper runs risk of being ignored. I maintain, how- 
ever, that in emulation of the named Leipzig model, a 
publisher could achieve fortune and renown, if he would 
spend the same money which now suborns newspaper crit- 



278 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

icism through the advertisements, on educating our pub- 
lic to artistically paper-bound books ; he would suc- 
ceed where his forerunners, striking the iron too soon, 
failed. 

Read could not be called a man of letters ; but he was 
as genuine a humorist, a student of American character 
as thorough, as any man our time produced. He wrote 
too much; his work was often mere journalism — as that 
of Kipling, and G. W. Steevens, was journalism; — but 
he voiced the real America far more accurately than any 
baker's dozen of accomplished literary dandies writ large 
in the magazines. 

There is always the proper mean in these matters. If 
I admire style, if I think it vitally lacking in our letters, 
that need not blind me to the belief that some great nat- 
ural talents are great without style. It is not the Opie 
Reads who have plunged us into our abyss of mediocrity ; 
it is the countless " climbers " who, having nothing to 
say, say it badly. Opie Read always had something to 
say, and he said it as forthrightly as any great natural 
force. 

Of the stories Opie Read told, or of those told about 
him, some few have bearing on my case. " I was highly 
flattered the other day," he said to me once in the Press 
Club, " in an article on ' Literary Earnings.' It said I 
made $10,000 a year easily." He paused, and then went 
on, apparently apropos of nothing, " I'm posted for my 
dues here." 

A friend met Opie Read on the street. A new novel 
by the latter had already been announced, but he was 
wandering leisurely along, munching an apple, and try- 
ing to find a skyline somewhere beyond the hideous sky- 
scrapers of Chicago. " Hallo, Opie," said the friend ; 
" got to work yet? " 

" You bet," said Opie, " I'm busy's a bee. Bought 
some ink day before yesterday; got a ream of paper 
yesterday ; and a pen to-day. To-morrow " 



CRITICISM 279 

" Well," urged the friend, filling in the pause, " to- 
morrow? " 

" To-morrow," concluded Read, " I'll buy a paper- 
weight." 

Many reasons might be alleged for this man's failure 
to reach the national renown of his compeers. His fellow- 
townsmen, Peter Dunne and George Ade, both became 
more conspicuous figures ; yet at least one of them was 
not worth the most careless page Opie Read ever wrote. 
Allowing for the element of sheer Luck — so vital an ele- 
ment in literary success, that Walter Blackburne Harte 
once named the Devil and Dame Chance as success's most 
vital factors ! — and allowing also for the publishing and 
critical cabals of the East, there remains the matter of 
sheer honesty. Opie Read, with many of those other 
Western strangers to compromise, was too honest to play 
the game as to-day it has to be played. I never saw a 
more disgusted man than he when he was returned, once, 
from a month or so in New York, attending the birth 
of a play of his which Stuart Robson was producing. 

For the game of letters, and of newspapers, as it is 
to-day, is no game for honest men. They may come into 
it honest, but they rarely stay so. Let me invent, upon 
this point, an imaginary dialogue: 



CHAPTER TWO 

A Happy Infant and a Jaded Hack found them- 
selves doomed to dine together. The one was still as 
full of optimism as the Atlantic of water; the other had 
not been on speaking terms with optimism for more years 
than the Happy Infant had ever seen. Gastronomically 
both were in their tabledotage. 

At the curry of chicken the Happy Infant held his 
glass of logwood-essence up to the light, as if to per- 
suade his eyes of what his stomach denied, and then re- 
1 marked in the tone of a man just fallen heir to a million 
of money: 

" I am thinking of going in for literature." 

The other grunted, " You always were a fool ! " 

" I thought I'd get your candid opinion. You know 
the game from A to Z. You know me. I believe I'm 
decently intelligent; I don't habitually mistreat the 
King's English. But I'd rather be a poor gentleman 
than a rich cad. Tell me — this game of writing for a 
living, what sort is it? " 

The older man sighed. " Why come to me? " he asked. 
" There is plenty of other counsel. Robert Louis Stev- 
enson " 

" I know," was the interruption, " I have read that. 
And Andrew Lang — and others. But I thought them a 
little too — fine. I want to get nearer the earth. So 
I ask you " 

" Thank you," said the Jaded Hack, smiling, " I ac- 
cept your unconscious slight without bitterness. Tush — , 
you're perfectly right ; I'm not among the Parnassians. 
I know that ; better than you. But that's not nearly so 
bad as my being satisfied with it. You want my ex~ 
280 



CRITICISM 281 

perience? Well " He lit a cigar, and went on: 

" You have youth, average education, and a few ideals. 
You have read some of the old masters, and even know 
something of the modern schools. You feel a stir of 
creation in you ; you want to write books, but you realise 
that books, like canvas for the painter, are speculations 
at long range. Before you become artist, you might as 
well be apprentice. So you turn to newspaper work. To 
make your living by it, you think, will be easy enough ; 
merely to write every day what will bring the morrow's 
bread and butter can be no great matter. The chief thing 
needed i's to know how to write ; you think that, don't 
you?" 

The other nodded. 

" Fatal error ! You think, as long as you produce 
readable stuff, that nothing else matters? Wrong, all 
wrong! What you need is diplomacy and intrigue. It's 
not a man's work that counts, it's the man himself. His 
ability to round a paragraph, turn a phrase, to scent 
news and make the most of it ; none of these things 
count. You would be astonished if I told you the names 
of men high in metropolitan newspaper repute as capable 
editors, who have never written a sentence of good Eng- 
lish in their lives. They came to promotion after pro- 
motion simply through personal politics, chicane, and 
all the arts of strategy selfishly applied. What energy, 
what brain, these men had, they applied not to writing 
the most trenchantly, or cultivating in themselves and 
others the finest taste, but to most successfully currying 
favor with employers, undermining the reputations and 
positions of superiors, plotting against possible rivals, 
and mounting, if need be, on the prostrate forms of 
even their best friends. In no other profession in the 
world do men stoop so low in intrigue and cunning to 
gain success which others attempt only by honest industry. 

"What's the use naming names? You won't believe 
me, as it is. But I can assure you that if you come 



282 THEIR DAY IN COUIIT 

into this arena with nothing but your pen and a clean 
conscience, you will need to be something like a genius 
to succeed against the weapons other men use. I'm per- 
fectly willing to admit that I, for instance, am a howl- 
ing failure, from the world's standpoint. And I thank 
my everlasting stars I've never toadied to a man I loathed, 
cringed to a lesser spirit, lied about my fellows or written 
a word I didn't honestly believe. I don't think many of 
the successful gentlemen can say as much. . . . One 
shrewd customer, I recall, once admitted to me that in 
arranging his days he always set aside two to three hours 
each day to the purpose of what he called ' seeing peo- 
ple.' He wished to keep himself always in sight; when 
a desk showed a vacant chair, he wanted to be near the 
door and able to step in ; he confessed that his writing 
was not up to much, but that in being ' on the spot ' 
you couldn't beat him. 

" Let us suppose you consider newspaper work merely 
as a means to the end of literature. If you continue 
where you began, the newspaper will eventually so loosen 
and vitiate any style you may have that your English 
becomes journalese, and instead of a creator you become 
a machine. Let us suppose you turn into the narrower 
lane of literature. Your very apostasy will bring you 
enemies ; the whole newspaper world, in so far as it re- 
members you, is against you. Your youth, remember, is 
a crime. To have opinions is a danger; to express them 
is to reap the whirlwind. Every age has the literary 
mentors it deserves ; ours has had Boks and Harveys." 

" There must be a golden mean ? " 

" A mean, yes ; but not golden. There is a sort of 
borderland between literature and the newspaper. In that 
field logrolling is the chief industry. Literary reputa- 
tions, to-day, are largely a matter of log-rolling. One 
day you will see an innocent paragraph stating that Mrs. 
Tomdick has written a novel sharply satirising society; 
to-morrow you note somewhere else that Mrs. Tomdick, 



CRITICISM 283 

as well known in literature as in society, is to lecture at 
the High Tea Club on Modern Fiction; and presently 
a very flood of paragraphs announces that lady's taste 
in coiffure or Ibsen. In fact, by the time the good 
woman's yarn is really ready for the public, the public 
has been badgered into such a state of nervous irrita- 
tion as to Mrs. Tomdick's activities, that it buys her 
trash in sheer despair. She has ' worked the press,' that 
modern oracle." 

The Happy Infant was still smiling, but not so 
blithely. 

" Did you begin — like this ? " he asked. 

" Of course not. I suppose I was the same sort of ass 
you are. I tried to think, otherwise, for years ; I can't 
any more. I see things as they are. Machiavelli did no 
more — and to-day they use his name as if it meant 
roguery ! No ; compared to things as they are, the old 
scheme of having a patron cannot have hurt one's self- 
respect half so much. Wasn't it better to admit one 
Maecenas, than curry favor with a dozen men less than 
yourself? " He threw the butt of his cigar into the 
fireplace, as if therewith to dismiss the subject. " Don't 
mind me," he said, " you're over seven, and I see you've 
made up your mind, and only ask advice, like any 
woman, because you don't mean to take it." 

" To listen to you," said the other, " purification of the 
press is as much needed as of politics, insurance, the 
police. . . . But even there, you know, a Theodore 
Roosevelt . . ." 

" Oh — you want to help clean out the stables, do you? 

You and Hercules and Roosevelt? Well " He did 

not finish the sentence. He took the Happy Infant's 
arm and walked him out into the clear night. Then he 
shook hands with him, and wiped away an airy tear. 
" To you, as one going to the wars, I say farewell, and 
Godspeed ! Good luck to you for a brave idiot ! " 

And he walked away whistling " Danny Deever." 



284 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

In that dialogue you gathered, I hope, some notion of 
what bitterness the newspaper life may start in those who 
attempt the fray armed only with intelligence and hon- 
esty. Yet, imagined as that conversation was, I assure 
you that not one line in it was as tragic a commentary 
as the actual career of the boldest and finest essayist 
our generation has seen in America, Walter Blackburn 
Harte. Nothing that I can write can equal for force 
and tragedy the closing pages in his essay " Some 
Masks and Faces," to be found in the volume " Medita- 
tions in Motley." " I have known hundreds of good, 
gentle, noble men who were bravos from high noon until 
two or three in the morning . . . after a few years 
in the masked service of journalism, even the most ro- 
bust talent is crippled and deformed ... a year 
or two as a journalistic cut- throat is enough to wholly 
corrupt and falsify their talent forever. . . ." 

The tragedy of all this was in the fact that this great 
essayist was as surely killed by the American news- 
papers as if they had given him poison or poignard. Be- 
cause of that essay from which I have just quoted, his 
book was ostracised by the American press ; a book which 
had elicited praise from the Academy in London, and 
from such as Israel Zangwili. Harte died of that, and 
of the bitter bread he ate as a newspaper reporter. 

This man, who had not only brains — a talent for both 
philosophical and analytical criticism, — but also, alas, a 
conscience, once wrote to me thus : 

"... I am alive — but if I were more of an idealist, 
and more of a philosopher at that, I should affirm at the same 
time that I am dead. Morally, at any rate, I am dead and 
buried. I am earning my bread and butter as a newspaper 
brigand. This, in America, is about the worst possible pass 
any man with any refinement of character, and any moral 
feeling can come to. I have no sympathy at all with hustle 
and noise and the triumph of machinery or of democracy as 
we get it, with Tammany and the hoodlums on top in society, 



CRITICISM 285 

politics and literature. I regard this democracy as a govern- 
ing power, especially in all intellectual matters, as the worst 
possible catastrophe. The mob from the time of Socrates 
until to-day has been governed by its belly and its vanity 
and brutal passions, and politically and socially needs the 
constant crack of the whips about its ears, in order to keep 
accord with the scheme of Nature — grovelling on its belly! 
". . . Every writer ought to put away all belief in the 
mob — it is the wanton that destroys us from a mere whim of 
total depravity. The mob! how many liyes are ruined and 
have been ruined in America by the mob ! What a pity George 
Washington was not made an absolute monarch with a con- 
science to teach the whelps good manners, and to give the 
arts the sanction of the only thing the mob respects, the sanc- 
tion of the interest of the accidentally great ones of the 
earth." 



It is plain, of course, that what was the matter with 
this poor fellow, this brilliant failure, was that he re- 
fused to compromise. If, like our modern merchants in 
brains, he had, having discovered what it was the mob 
wanted, given it that, he might to-day, with the Booth 
Tarkingtons and the Harry Wilsons, be spending his 
summer in Versailles and touring Italy in a motor-car. 
He might, perhaps, have put his tongue in his cheek 
at thought of the mob ; but he could have afforded to 
sneer at it, after he had pocketed its money. Too bad 
the man was cursed with a conscience! For, if you man- 
age to do without a conscience, the trick of success is 
really amazingly easy. You discover the demand and 
you supply it. Nothing is simpler. I have always argued 
that if man could rid himself of shame as easily as does 
woman, he could beat her at Ker chosen game of writing 
shameless novels. Even so, to get on in literature and 
journalism, shed your scruples — and the rest is easy. 

Above all, never be too original ! If you bring out, 
newly polished and smugly wiped, the stale conventions, 
the worn-out melodramas, and petty bathos, which 



286 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

amused yesterday, to-day will gladly keep you alive. 
But if, in a moment of exaltation, you pen an original 
thought, express an opinion which towers over the medi- 
ocre, the mob rises in its wrath and leaves you to — ■ 
poverty, or the newspapers. 

Only where there are intellectual dictators strong 
enough to lead the mob into the right path, can litera- 
ture exist. We have not had those ; the newspapers have 
betrayed our trust. As long as blind force of sheer 
numbers dictates the taste of the country; as long as the 
fool's mirage of Equality shall delude every man into 
believing that his neighbor has no right or title to be 
wiser than himself, — our literature, despite its apparent 
rankness of growth, will be as the weakling the Spartans 
killed lest it become deformity. Until then, our coat of 
arms — to paraphrase a onetime invention of Ambrose 
Bierce's, should be: An illiterate hoodlum, rampant, on 
a field of dead authors. Motto: "To — with Litera- 
ture ! " 



CHAPTER THREE 

Since the day when personal journalism — in the fine 
sense of the term — died out in America, the average 
newspaper here has pandered only to the mob. If, in that 
generic term, we include the mob of millionaires, we in- 
clude what, socially, is its most dangerous element. 
Anarchically considered, there is nothing to choose, for 
social danger, between the hooligan and the plutocrat. 
Artistically considered, the difference is but slightly 
greater. Walter Harte might have found the million- 
aire Maecenas of to-day — for those robber chieftains, 
the Medici, have ever their replicas — but I could also 
have pointed out to him other millionaires whose influence 
on the arts has been as baleful as that of an illiterate, in- 
sensate majority. Let us then — letting go the financial 
depths of its component atoms — say that the mob has 
been all that most newspapers have cared for. 

What the mob likes, the newspaper has proclaimed. 
That like, too, it has defined as the aim of imaginative 
literature. The authors who had the canny facility in 
compromise that made for success, found, through the 
newspapers, what the mob wanted; they provided that; 
and the rest of us were asked to consider it literature. 

I beg to be excused. 

Man, in the individual, is occasionally possessed of 
intelligence ; in the mass he has only instincts. Catering 
to mob-instincts is not literature. Our newspapers have 
seldom done anything else, nor permitted literature that 
did anything else. 

It is as easy to specify, as it is to generalise. In 
the years that I did my best to review current literature 
as honestly as I could, I noted some amazing dishonesties, 

287 



288 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

and some hideous stultification, on the part of those who 
through our newspapers are supposed to mould the pub- 
lic taste in books. It was impossible to keep chapter and 
verse of them all. But I can cite enough instances ; and 
for the rest I can count upon it that if I jog your 
memory you will, yourself, recall the entire lickspittle 
attitude of these fellows. 

Newspaper criticism here has been little but cuckoo 
criticism. In the days when we took all our successes 
from abroad, our newspapers simply echoed London. To- 
day, when successes are home-grown, they echo one an- 
other, and the publishers. In the average book review 
you see in the average newspaper, there is too little in- 
telligence or honesty. This need not matter so much, 
save inasmuch as thereby the public taste is vitiated, 
and American fiction in danger of being coddled to 
death. 

How this pampering which newspapers bestow on any 
and every novel, results in a weedy crop, my previous 
chapters have pointed out. The case is comparable to 
a period of bubble speculation in Wall Street ; there 
is a time of tremendous inflation — then suddenly, and 
for the best of reasons, the bottom drops out, the bubble 
bursts, and the world sees the airy fabric it has been 
duped into thinking too, too solid. American writing, 
in its vigor, its rankness, no longer needs any pamper- 
ing ; only the most vigorous pruning. What passes for 
criticism in our newspapers is little but a chorus of adula- 
tion. It means, consequently, absolutely nothing. 

Just as publishers hold that any fool, so he be no- 
torious, can write a book that they can sell, so our 
newspaper publishers, hold, apparently, the theory that 
any knave or fool can pass judgment on the art of 
letters. They let anybody, useless for anything else, 
review their books ; they do not enquire if their reviewers 
have either education or taste. The detail of being them- 
selves able to write is inessential. 



CRITICISM 289 

If ever individuals deserved pillory, they are they who 
emit some of the slush which, in journals of supposedly 
high standing, passes as review of current literature. 
Who are these men? For it comes, in these matters, 
always to the personal equation. Criticism at its best, I 
will ever maintain, is nothing but the honest expression 
of personal impressions ; it can have worth only when 
the personality behind it has the taste, the artistic in- 
stinct and the stern righteousness which separate wheat 
from tares ; can feel the spirit in other artists, and spot 
the shoddy and the mountebank. Who, then, were these 
persons who for years kept American newspaper criticism 
in a state where it was only press-work for the publishers ? 
If I knew, I would be glad to name them ; to name merely 
the crime is to be cowardly as they themselves. But, in 
most cases, the discreet veil of anonymity has hidden 
everything save the names of the newspapers printing 
this flood of meaningless eulogy. 

The Chicago Times-Her(ald, I remember, once wrote 
this, of a story which, worthless in the first place, is al- 
ready utterly forgotten : " more original than ' Richard 
Carvel,' more vital than ' Janice Meredith,' more cohesive 
than ' To Have and to Hold.' " Now that sentence has 
the entire vicious method compressed into it. One " best 
seller " is boosted recklessly into prominence ; then, when 
its fame wanes, it is still used by way of comparison. 
Not one of those three stories now survives, yet the 
wealth of bombast and imagery employed by that re- 
viewer was such as a discriminating critic would have 
hesitated to apply to " Vanity Fair." I can cite no more 
eloquent specimen of the pampering that passes, in our 
newspapers, for criticism. 

All such so-called critics were after was to say some- 
thing which, copied by the book-publishers into their ad- 
vertisements of a story alleged to be selling in six figures, 
might show their own power in gauging the popular 



290 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

taste. I say nothing of the secondary consideration of 
selling the publishers a book of their own ; literature is 
not yet, in that detail, as full of highwaymen as is the 
drama and dramatic criticism. 

For several seasons there was a veritable flood of 
stories advertised in America as " greater than David 
Harum." Every avenue in mediocrity was filled with 
rubbish, while every critical column and advertising column 
shrieked loudly the names of the newest " great " novel. 
How many of those " great " novels now survive? 

The Post, of Washington, made itself infamous by 
asking blandly, some time after Graham Balfour had is- 
sued the official Life of Robert Louis Stevenson : " Who 
is William Ernest Henley anyway ? " If that was actually 
ignorance, then it is a more terrible indictment of Ameri- 
can newspapers than anything one could invent. That 
the poet who wrote the " In Hospital " verses, rivaling 
Whitman in freedom from the old metric rules ; who wrote 
those wonderful stanzas beginning " Out of the night 
that covers me. . . ." ; who furthered, as editor, the 
fortunes of Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, H. B. Marriott- 
Watson, and Wm. Nicholson, the artist ; was unknown 
to that newspaper, was characteristic of our average 
newspaper attitude toward artistic affairs. If, on the 
other hand, the question was meant as an insult — well, 
then the Washington Post deserved still more the con- 
tempt of all intelligent people. 

An example of ignorance on the part of the Christian 
Union I have already quoted. That, however, was 
atoned for, by the very discriminating review which fol- 
lowed their discovery of a " new man," Ambrose Bierce. 
I could cite flagrant cases by merely picking up the 
day's paper, and picking random lines. Such authorities 
as the St. Paul Dispatch, the Brooklyn Eagle, and the 
Milwaukee Press agreed that George Cary Eggleston 
was a considerable author; when I tried to read a book 
of his (" Blind Alleys ") I found in it a sentence stat- 



CRITICISM 291 

ing that " there was very nearly nothing ordinarily in 
common between them " ; after that I lost my respect for 
those newspapers.. 

The crux of the whole matter, of course, is that there 
is, in the average American newspaper, too little criticism 
which is not dominated by the " business office," that is, 
by the advertising patronage. This does not only apply 
to the arts. Those reading between the lines have long 
seen that not only is news " colored " to suit the com- 
mercial prejudices of the different papers ; but that the 
actual editorial comment, the criticism of men and mat- 
ters, is seldom so subservient to principles as to profits. 
On this, once again, I would refer you to the admi- 
rable pamphlet called " The Myth of a Free Press," 
adding only a few personal observations of my 



The correspondents employed to cable European news 
to America rarely favor us with anything which has not 
a commercial basis for its publicity. The arts of Europe 
are seldom mentioned unless an American manager has 
just bought a new play, or a publisher a book. 

At home, and abroad, in fact, our arts are at the 
mercy of the press-agent. Dramatic criticism has not 
existed in New York for some years. Press-agents write 
our plays, and — openly or secretly — conduct the so-called 
critical columns in the dailies. They become rich; while 
the author who thinks his work can speak for itself, is 
soon taught the error of his ways, and shown the way 
to the poorhouse — or compromise. With all their power, 
these men — especially those posted on the European fron- 
tiers — are amazingly stupid. They rarely find anything 
until some town has become tired of it years ago; or 
until something else leads them to it. Just as I have 
wondered who the newspaper critics of books were, so I 
have wished I might meet face to face those knights of 



292 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

the press-agents' round-table who are represented an- 
nually as scouring Europe for novelties. There is no 
richer field than the one before them ; yet for all they 
discover there of novelty, they might be so many sheep ; 
nothing they find is less than two years old, and has the 
seal of all Europe on it. 

No ; if they would only confine their energies to cabling 
home the important announcement that Mr. and Mrs. 
Plazaza, in their ninety- and-nine h.p. Odol car, have just 
reached the Splits Hotel, they would be keeping more 
wisely within the limits of their intelligence. 

I have known some of these slaves of the cable. Let 
me tell here an episode that has bearing on the whole 
matter of the newspaper writer and his trade, as well as 
on the naive nature of that particular Franco-American. 
We had been workers in the same vineyard on this side 
of the water. Meeting him in Paris during the summer 
in which Edward 7th's illness delayed his coronation, he 
filled me with the tale of his woes. He was the Paris 
cable correspondent for one of the metropolitan news- 
papers here. He told serio-comic stories of the detective- 
like duties they expected of him ; how he had to become 
a key-hole-spy on this newly married American million- 
aire, and had to invent interviews with that captain of 
more or less notorious industry. He concluded, did this 
voluble naive Frenchman. 

" I tell you what it is, my dear fellow, I tell you : 
they ask of me things — things no gentleman can do." 
Then, after a pause, his face illuminated, " I tell you ; 
why don't you take the job? " 

Only after elaborate explanation, did he see the irony 
of his conclusion and his question. As it affected me, I 
laughed heartily enough ; but as it threw light on what 
newspaper owners expect of their " buccaneers " — to use 
poor Harte's word — it was by no means matter for 
laughter. 



CRITICISM 293 

This is perhaps as fit a place as any for a confession 
of my own. I have as critic of letters been singularly 
fortunate. For more than a decade I have reviewed cur- 
rent literature through the columns of at least one weekly 
paper which never gave me anything but a free hand. It 
supposed me to be honest ; after that it asked no ques- 
tions. Never, in all those years, have I been asked to 
trim my opinions to suit the advertising columns. 

One of the secrets of the absolutely free hand I had 
was that to all intents publishers' advertisements were 
excluded from the paper's columns. 

In that office, indeed, I had the satisfaction of seeing 
a cheap sort of pirate publisher practically kicked out of 
the office for insinuating that certain published censure 
had for object only the forcing him into advertising. The 
fellow, after that, could not have bought " space " in 
those columns for love or money. 

On another occasion I came up against the sort of 
critic to whom we owe our present rank condition in the 
arts, and his effort to employ " office politics " against 
me, whose only weapons were honesty and the strength 
of my opinions, came happily to naught. Notoriously a 
press-agent in guise of a critic, he was extremely shrewd 
in selling plays as well as criticism. Being at that time 
myself a critic of the theatre, I was one evening assigned 
to review a play by this gentleman. If it had been good 
and he had been my bitterest enemy, I would have been 
glad to say so ; it struck me as very bad indeed — I have 
happily forgotten it ; it was a war-play of some sort ; 
the word Cumberland was in the title, I think — and I 
told the public so. Whereupon he committed the indis- 
cretion of informing my employer that I was nursing a 
private feud, and was therefore unfit to figure as critic. 
My employer believed my honesty before the other's chi- 
cane, and I was left unmolested as critic. But you see, 
do you not, what I meant, a few pages before, when 
I said that simply to write and be honest was not enough ; 



294 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

that skill in intrigue was the greater quality for success. 
This man, you see, at once took to what he supposed 
was the most powerful weapon in his world. 

My own case, my not being interfered with, was, I 
believe, so exceptional, that I shall be as delighted as 
astonished if I can hear of its being paralleled. How 
glad I would be to know that there were other critics 
who had never had to subdue their candor to either com- 
promise or advertising contracts ! 

In just one way could the conditions of criticism in 
most American newspapers be reformed. Only when pub- 
lishing advertisements are subjected to the same censor- 
ship as are patent medicine advertisements, or when they 
are refused altogether, will criticism be able to raise its 
head. 

As long as the publishers are allowed to shout them- 
selves hoarse in the advertisements, so long will the re- 
viewers be the " pawns of their stomachs." Even if we 
suppose the critic's paragraph of censure is printed, what 
will it avail against the shriek of the double-column " dis- 
play ad."? When the public sees in huge type the lie 
that a certain story is greater than all other stories, it 
can hardly be blamed for taking the bait. 

The blame may not logically be placed on the pub- 
lishers. 

These are confessedly commercial gentlemen ; the fact 
that they are merchants in art does not lessen their 
need to employ mercantile methods. 

When you saw the flaming advertisements of such and 
such a novel, with amazing adjectives credited to this 
or that prominent journal, did it never occur to you 
that most of those phrases are as much part of the 
publishers's paraphernalia as his printing-press? Books 
published to-day, either in England or America, are 
often accompanied by various specimen stereotyped 



CRITICISM 295 

" criticisms " in all the extremes of eulogy. The pub- 
lishers, in thus jogging the reveiwers, put a premium 
on laziness and lying; but their argument is commer- 
cially shrewd enough. They argue that it is mostly the 
office-idiot who " does the books " ; and such overworked 
hireling is not likely to spill his own brains and time 
when he has ready-made phrases at his scissors' point. 
To assure the lay mind that I am not writing wildly, I 
will say that I have — in my voluminous collection of 
other polite literary lies, — quite sufficient evidence of this 
sort to prove a far weaker case. 

All of which reminds me of an ancient fantasy I once 
proposed for the general entertainment. It was " To 
Promote Leisure Among Critics," and I wrote it years 
ago; but it still holds good. Let me append it verbatim: 

A number of persons, of the kind referred to in the 
technical journals as Nature's Noblemen, might have been 
seen a few days ago entering the Home for Incurable 
Philanthropists. They were publishers, and they were 
come at call of the secretary of the society for the Propa- 
gation of Leisure among Book Reviewers. 

Having hung their hats where the draught could fan 
them, these good men sat down in solemn circle. The 
real business of interest began when the senior member 
of the great firm that first introduced smooth poetry on 
rough paper, as against rough poetry on smooth paper, 
arose, and, coughing politely, said: 

" You have asked the committee, for which I now 
speak, to draft a series of formulas to be used to the 
end that the down-trodden critic may have his hard lot 
eased a little. It has been — need I say it — a labor of 
love. I will read a rough draft of the documents we 
have prepared. 

" In the first place, we have decided that all authors, 
before they obtain the glory of our imprint, must agree 
to write a synopsis of one-hundred words containing all 



296 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

the things the critic really need know. We reserve the 
right to syndicate these synopses as prose-pastels. They 
are to be in English, French, German, Italian, and Jour- 
nalese, and in every case to be signed by the author. 

" Also, the author shall invariably read carefully the 
first copy of his book leaving the press, with a view to 
finding errors in his own style. He shall prepare a care- 
ful list of all such mistakes, as also of errors in proof- 
reading. A list of these, accompanied by some appropri- 
ate and new jest, such as the one about ' See the pale 
martyr with his shirt on fire ' is to go to the reviewer, 
so that he can be properly facetious on that score. 

" In every case, our head reader is to spend several 
days at the Astor Library, searching for evidences of the 
similarity between the new work and one already in 
existence. Can such likeness be discovered, a leading 
satirist is to be employed to slate the new book as a 
plagiarism. Proof slips of this accusation are to be 
sent to all reviewers. This has been found wonderfully 
stimulating to our sales. 

" For the use of critics employing the Methode Jean- 
nette we propose that all really readable chapters in new 
novels be printed separately on slips and introduced by 
such sentences as : 'It is in descriptions such as this 
that Mr. Lawfurd excels,' or ' It is this passage that the 
Saturday Review has called greater than Tolstoy.' 

" Every week each reviewer is to be supplied with a 
new list of adjectives, commendatory and otherwise, spe- 
cially prepared by one of our bright young men from 
a Dictionary of Synonyms. 

" In the case of books of Memoirs, a column of anec- 
dotes culled from them is to be sent to the critics under 
personal cover. Where it is a collection of stories that 
have appeared before in the magazines, paragraphs are 
to be prepared on this plan : ' Very few people, I dare 
say, remember that gem of a story that appeared in the 
Old Stiff's Monthly in '85, but it impressed me, I recol- 



CRITICISM 297 

lect, very forcibly, so that I said then — Here is an author 
who will do great things, etc., etc' The use of these 
will give the criticisms a note of personal interest very 
hard to obtain under the old system of having reviewers 
read the books themselves, instead of the reviews we pre- 
pare for them. 

" Finally, where a reviewer should feel tempted to say 
nothing whatever about a book, we have decided to fur- 
nish him with a blank " 

At this moment a tall individual, well known as the 
junior member of the firm that gives a pink tea with 
every one of its publications, rose to a point of order. 

" I beg your pardon," he said, " but how can we pos- 
sibly furnish him with a blank for saying nothing what- 
ever? " 

" I repeat that I suggested furnishing him with a 
blank " 

" Absurd ! " again interrupted the other. " All re- 
viewers already have blanks. That is all they have. If 
they had anything else this society of ours would not be. 
If » 

At this juncture, it is sad to relate, there arose that 
difficulty in the unraveling of which the society broke up 
in some disorder. But who can doubt that much good 
had been done? 

Now, flippant as that may seem on its surface, it is 
based seriously on actual facts. 

The list of American newspapers who maintain a 
critic independent of the " business office " is so small 
that I do not trust myself to hint it. 

In short, the same thing applies to our newspaper 
writers which applies to our novelists. The day of the 
underpaid, drunken, pariah-like journalist may be at an 
end; and instead of that we hear almost as much of the 
wonderful wages paid a Brisbane, as we do of the royal- 



298 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ties earned on a " Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch " ; 
but has the quality of the man risen or fallen? I have 
shown how in our rabbit-like fecundity we are killing those 
novelists who would also be artists. I verily believe, too, 
that the vagabond and sot of an elder period was a 
more honest writer than the newspaper " critic " of to- 
day who gets his " puffs " printed large in the " display 
ads." of the publishers. 

I say this in full memory of the Nym Crinkles who, 
however brilliant, brought American dramatic criticism 
into such ill-repute a generation or so ago. 

Whether fame or infamy be their reward, the news- 
papers have certainly done some remarkable things where 
they have touched on literature. In general, they have 
made the taste of our people — what it is ; and they have 
permitted the notoriety and prosperity of those mediocri- 
ties who for several decades have obscured our horizon. 
They have hindered as much as helped the men of real 
talent. If they lifted Edwin Markham into momentary 
eminence, they chose his least artistic utterance as ex- 
cuse. A San Francisco journal gained a peculiarly hor- 
rid renown by refusing a famous story by Kipling when 
that genius first landed there from the Orient. I retain, 
in my documentary chamber of horrors, the printed evi- 
dence of certain public lying committed in 1898 by 
Messrs. Richard Harding Davis and Frederic Reming- 
ton on the subject of cruelty to women committed by 
Spaniards ; the one signed an account, the other drew a 
large sketch, of what never happened; and all this was 
done at instigation of a so-called newspaper of metro- 
politan pretensions. Why should one believe these " buc- 
caneers " at one time more than another? Where they 
falsify facts, are they to be believed honest in opinions 
on art? 

Not even my own insignificance has escaped the il- 
logical energies of that curious crew, the newspaper 



CRITICISM 299 

critics. Concerning a volume of stories which one critic 
was good enough to compare for psychology to the work 
of Marcel Prevost, a Chicago paper called the author " a 
disciple of Le Gallienne, while not so forceful," and a 
St. Louis paper said the book's style " reminds one of 
Le Gallienne's Golden Girl, though it is jnore masculine." 
If you can adjust those two statements, you can doubt- 
less also square a circle. ... Of a novel one critic 
averred that it reminded of Mallock's *'"' Romance of the 
Nineteenth Century/'" another that it had " genuine Ger- 
trude-Athertonian fervor." The author might take his 
choice. ... A satiric story sent out anonymously 
was attributed by the critics to Wm. Marion Reedy, Ger- 
trude Atherton and Richard Harding Davis : one set of 
critics declared it the work of an unlettered amateur, 
another averred only one of the most practised craftsmen 
could have written it. Of certain stories in 

picaresque vein I learned that " the spirit of imitation is 
over them all," yet the hero was held to be " an excep- 
tional character." This book, by the way, stirred the 
author of " The Affair at Coulters Notch " to this 
reminiscence : 

" That is unnatural. Your hero would not have thrown 
shot and shell into his own dwelling rather than explain 
matters to his brigade commander," said a critic. 

" The person that you have in mind would not." re- 
plied the author of the story criticised, ''"' I ventured to 
think that I might interest the reader in one that 
would." 

From the anonymous criticism in newspapers, taste, in- 
telligence and good writing issue so rarely that it might 
as well be non-existent. It is not in my mind here to 
discuss the old, worn topic of anonymity, which comes up 
often enough. My readers know, by now, that rny theory 
of useful criticism bars both the academic and the anony- 
mous : each vear makes those old shibboleths more falla- 



300 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

cious. The fact that I myself have in the past had to 
work under the veil has but made me more steadfast in 
my view; nor did I ever seek to disguise my personality 
of my own accord. If my work as critic did not impress 
the value of my name on American publicists, the fault 
did not lie with me. 

The public, of course, long ago ceased paying any at- 
tention to the average newspaper criticism. Patient and 
stupid as it is, it could not fail to perceive the absurdity 
in opinions and adjectives that spilled equal eulogy on 
everything. It gave the problem up altogether ; it trusted 
entirely to whatever, at the moment, happened to be the 
fashion, and the subject of the loudest noise in the ad- 
vertising pages. It admitted, frankly, that the artistic 
was out of question ; only commercial figures, only the 
arguments of sheer quantity, seemed worth noting. 

The American press pretends, I believe, to a large share 
in the education of the human mass. If seeking always 
the lowest intellectual level of the greatest possible num- 
ber be education, that pretense has truth behind it. But 
if truthtelling, if honesty of opinion without selfseeking 
or profit, if castigating the sinners rather than vaporing 
cannily about the sin, have anything to do with it, then 
the press of America has been abominably blameworthy. 

What, then, of criticism outside the newspapers? Has 
there been real criticism, real censorship? 

Let us see. 



CHAPTER FOUR 

If American criticism had been other than a mirage 
for the last quarter of a century, we would be able, you 
will admit, to name the critics. Whom, then, may we 
name in the same breath with Andrew Lang, Walter Pater, 
Hermann Bahr, F. Sarcey, Georg Brandes or Herbert 
Paul? Or, to come to conspicuous moderns: George 
Moore, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Symons, Wal- 
ter Frewen Lord, or Catulle Mendes? 

Not only do I defy you to name an equal list ; I aver 
that in criticism upon all the arts — of music, painting, 
drama and literature — America has not more than a 
handful of fine and honest workmen. Instead of criticism 
we have commercialism. The one has erased the other. 
With any critics deserving the name, the dollar could 
not have ousted all other considerations from American 
art. 

In plain logic, I need not have asked that question: 
have we critics in America? since the condition of our 
letters, — the dominance of mediocrities in fiction, and the 
utter absence of any vigor in the finer provinces of writ- 
ten art — eloquently proves criticism absent. 

Criticism has been written, it is true, outside the news- 
papers. But in what has its tone differed from the pam- 
pering attitude of the journals? We had a Julian Haw- 
thorne using a distinguished name to promulgate such 
assertions as " we have lately seen George Du Maurier 
write the novels of three seasons, one after the other." 
Which was not only a misstatement of fact, but an un- 
necessary one. Whatever " Trilby " may have been — and 
I recall that when Georg Brandes visited London in 
1896, he was amazed at " that farrago of hopeless ab- 



302 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

surdity, compound of diluted Murger and Dumas' ' Lady 
of the Camelias,' served up with hypnotism and hocus- 
pocus for grown-up infants " — neither " Peter Ibbetson " 
nor " The Martians," artistic achievements aside, ever 
so much as came within miles of being " best sellers." 

There, then, you see, what some of our supposedly con- 
siderable writers descended to in mistaking log-rolling for 
criticism. 

The essence of the whole matter is that the pampering 
attitude, as to a so-called " infant industry," has not 
only been maintained by our pretending critics, but has 
even, as theory and practise, been openly defended by 
them. You have already been reminded of the " Let them 
all in ! " invitations issued from time to time by such dis- 
tinguished authorities as Professor William James, and 
William Dean Howells. They hesitated to bar the gate 
against the fools, lest some rare genius might be shut out. 
Another professor, Brander Matthews, went further. 

The function of the literary critic, he declared, is to 
expound, not to judge. 

In other words, the critic is to be merely an unsalaried 
press-agent for the publishers. This theory was delivered 
and signed within the decade ; its practise has grown un- 
til now there is hardly any other sort of criticism left ; 
and the result on our letters is obvious. 

There was nothing new in the theory. It merited no 
more attention than any other of the million stupidities of 
the passing day, but for the apparent prominence of its 
author. Mr. Matthews being known as professor of lit- 
erature at a prominent college, and as author of a num- 
ber of polite prose volumes, was generally taken to be an 
authority on matters literary. He represented, to some 
eyes, Those in Authority over American Letters. It was 
true that his position and his energies had seldom been 
other than those of an amiable dilettante ; it was true 
that the theory in question had been decried in former 
essays of his own; but it was equally true that the ma- 



CRITICISMHiaH" 303 

jority rarely pauses to consider Such inconsistent logic. 
Simply because of the number rif/alfeisjrftqlumes, and the 
polite attention with which the Easteom literary coteries 
greet any verdict of his, a large public doubtless con- 
sidered him seriously as an authority. -,:,;Yet, if his earlier 
opinions on the function of criticism were worth anything, 
his later ones could be worth nothing. 

To say nothing of the terrifying spectacle to-day con- 
fronting the candid observer, was there not already, when 
this eminent optimist proclaimed the critical functions, 
too much of mere echoings of plots, too much mere repe- 
tition of what the publishers wished said? How many 
pages were there in the daily, the weekly, the monthly 
prints, wherein you might find book criticism of any 
decent standard in honesty and readability? Where were 
you to look for reviews without the taints of ignorance, 
carelessness, or advertisement? Yet, in that condition 
of things critical Mr. Matthews proclaimed his theory 
that exposition, not judgment, was the full duty of the 
critic ! 

The critic, if he deserves his title, has a tremendous 
duty. He stands at the gateway between the publish- 
ers and the public. His chief duty is to the public. 
Nextly, to the author. Not at all to the publisher. The 
publisher is an impertinent middleman who should have 
no place at all in the consideration of the reviewer; a 
fact we have by now done our best utterly to forget. 

The methods of the theatre have been successfully em- 
ployed in the book business. Daily we note in the meth- 
ods of booksellers the equivalent to that profitable if im- 
pudent announcement, wherein Mr. Solomon Isaacs 
informed his clients that such and such a farce was the 
very funniest he had ever produced. Exactly so do we 
have paraded before us the opinions of the publishers 
on their own books. The worst of it is that some of us are 
so innocent of humor and logic as to be impressed by this 



304 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

bold quackery. Yet they talk of American humor! Or 
perhaps, again, the device succeeds because we humorously 
admire its very brazen effrontery? Worse yet! That 
attitude of tolerance is one of the most lamentable 
features in our national temper. 

Observe where, to keep to the domain of letters, it 
has led us. We are, to all intents, without great criticism 
in this country. The farther we go along the path in- 
dicated by the professors, the more impossible we make 
it for not only great criticism but valuable literature 
to survive. 

The reading public needs protection more than ever 
before. Not only is time too valuable, but the influence 
toward general intellectual mediocrity is too great for 
the present deluge of printed rubbish to be allowed con- 
tinuance. We have heard a good deal in late years of 
the league between the police and crime. The police, 
as we know, exist, in theory, to protect society against 
the lawless. Yet, despite occasional waves of reform 
and investigation, in almost every civic centre of the 
land there notoriously exists a league between the police 
and the powers that prey. The police, when pressed, in- 
variably claim that without such league with the lawless 
society could not effectively be protected. Exactly the 
same state of things exists in the literary world. 

The critic should be in the policeman's position. It is 
his duty to protect the reading public against the pub- 
lisher. Instead of which, nine times out of ten he is 
openly in league with the publisher. The same specious 
argument is used here, too ; critics of this sort pretend 
they cannot properly serve the public unless they first 
learn the needs and views of the publisher. In this league, 
as we have seen, newspapers seem criminally implicated. 
A critic's business, his employers maintain, is to achieve 
a line or a paragraph that will look well in an adver- 
tisement. For, if the publisher, seizing that line, spreads 
it broadcast, is not that also a splendid puff for the 



CRITICISM 305 

newspaper that originated it? And so on, to the end 
of the nauseating chapter. A league between the police 
and the criminal could do no greater harm to the intelli- 
gent people of America, than a league between publishers 
and critics. 

It is obvious that the critic with a mind single toward 
the reading public and the noble language of our race, 
has a lonely way before him. Friends desert, and enemies 
multiply; publishers, if he lay about among their tin 
idols censoriously, will proclaim him a blackmailer trying 
to force publication of his own books. At the least, he 
will hear the rumor of his private failures having driven 
him to dog-in-the-manger attitudes. 

None of these barriers must stop him. Let him think 
of Pope, and Swift, and Poe and Byron. 

If he would satisfy his conscience, and his sense of 
what is due the art of letters as against the abominable 
lowering of the public taste, the critic must go on re- 
lentlessly damning the incompetents, and striving, day 
after day, to bring the majority to realise the difference 
between what is genuine and what is shoddy. He must, 
if he can, ridicule the charlatans and the shoddy-mongers 
until they leave literature alone. At the end, he may find 
himself isolated; hated, and worn out; but he will have 
served soldierly in as great a cause as ever man lifted 
pen for. It is a cause that cries to heaven. For unless 
the flood of shoddy is stopped, the public taste will 
perish utterly. The majority is too ignorant and indo- 
lent, too waxen in the hands of those who subtly fashion 
the advertisements and dictate the " criticism." The mere 
might of numbers (so worshiped by our professors) awes 
and deludes the majority. If a book has sold into six 
figures, that seems argument enough. The majority 
wishes to be like, never to be different. 

You may say : — ah, but they can't make us read books 
we don't want to read! They not only can, but they 
do; for, unfortunately, you don't know what you do 



306 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

want, and the whole national attitude on art is still one 
of imitation and mob-rule. 

That men of the type of our professors, men of taste, 
able — and they would ! — to stand at the gateway through 
which the vitiating flood now pours, should adopt this 
over-tolerant pose is the worst feature in the whole mat- 
ter. " Let us go easy," they intimate, " let the pub- 
lishers and the authors prosper; why quarrel with all 
this successful business ? " So cry the " easy bosses " of 
literature. To employ the bludgeon is no longer genteel ; 
it smacks of a by-gone brutal age ; it is rude, and unman- 
nerly. Moreover, if you use it, they will see to it that 
you are put on the " blacklist " so as to persuade you to 
repentance. 

Bah ! Such sniveling makes one sick ! 

What we need is critics unafraid, dowered with taste 
to tell the true from the sham, and with courage to 
spread the tale. Critics whose only duty is toward the 
public and the art of letters. Any mass, any public, you 
may say, is sure to be held in contempt by critics of taste 
and discrimination? And even so? What then? A critic 
may think ill of the majority, and may yet, because of 
what he would have that majority be, labor daily on be- 
half of its intellectual salvation. A critic may think the 
present case of letters woefully low and sordid, and yet 
write valiantly in the cause of its uplifting. 

The critic must have that God-given quality — taste. 
If he have not that, he may have all the classicism in 
the world, and yet fail as keeper of the gate. He must 
not be a book-worm, or a closet-man. He must have 
ears and eyes open for the mental attitude of the man on 
the street, as well as for that of the brainless beauty in 
the boudoir, or the student in the garret. (With which 
reflection, indeed, I began this book!) He must be able 
to appreciate the most diverse talents ; the brute vigor 
of a Kipling, the polished calm of a Pater, the involutions 



CRITICISM 307 

of a James, and the unvarnished earnestness of an Ather- 
ton. He must be staunch against the lures of commerce, 
the clamor of ill-considered acclaim. Above all, he must 
have no scruples about doing his best to keep literature 
clear of the incompetents. Writing bad books is far too 
easy to-day ; one of the reasons for the brazenness with 
which it is achieved is that there is no adequate punish- 
ment. The critic should be prepared to punish. To de- 
prive him of the punitive power is to assure the ultimate 
rot of American literature. 

In another department of the arts, I remember, we 
were treated, not long since, to an opinion similar to 
that of Mr. Matthews. A St. Louis critic of the theatre 
confessed that he held it the duty of his position to ac- 
claim what was sure to please, irrespective of whether 
he thought it ought to please. In other words, if the 
public taste was declining at the rate of a mile a minute, 
he had no obligation other than to decline with it. A 
fine theory, indeed ! All our arts need criticism ; criticism 
based on sure and sane taste, so that the public shall 
be uplifted rather than allowed to mire in the muck of its 
natural mediocrity, and that the purveyors of plays and 
of books be made afraid to palm off the spurious and the 
vicious. 

In the domain of the playhouse, as in that of pub- 
lishing, the production of the unworthy is lamentably 
easy. The notion that any young woman with decent 
presence can take to the theatre for a livelihood is still 
as prevalent as that any fool can write a book. The 
notion is quite true ; these things not only can be done, 
but are. How many charming young women do we not 
all know, in every possible province of society, who are 
convinced, in moments of discontent with the routine of 
life, that they are adapted for a stage career? If you 
ask on what that conviction is based, you will receive, 
if any reply at all, merely a stare signifying that you 



308 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

must be blind to certain obvious charms of face and 
figure. Exactly ; there is the point ! 

Every pretty little idiot, endowed by that amiable 
jester, nature, with an attractive countenance, a grace- 
ful manner, a voice, a pair of arms and the same number 
of legs — who is not, in brief, absolutely deformed — thinks 
she has the entire quota of requirements for the theatre. 
The abomination of all of which is, that in the present 
state of theatrical criticism, she is right. Modern play- 
goers, educated by the modern play-critic, will excuse, 
even applaud, a theatrical article that is not one solitary 
thing other than a vehicle for an exhibition of good- 
looking women. " There was no plot," you declare, or, 
" the music was vapid," or, " the lines were dull." All 
the answer from the average playgoer is that " it was 
the prettiest bunch of girls in any show this season." 
That the theatre has other purposes than exhibiting the 
females of our race is rarely hinted. Between our pres- 
ent attitude toward the theatre, and the condition in that 
Alexandria which Louys painted in his " Aphrodite " 
there is not one atom of difference. This attitude most 
of our critics are determined to continue. It is true 
that in many of our metropolitan towns efforts are made 
from time to time to put the theatre on a non-commercial 
basis. Mostly, however, these are sporadic outbursts ; 
mostly failure attends them. 

About " independent theatre " movements, I do not 
speak without authority. Some ten years or so ago, I 
was myself active in such an enterprise. Its name was 
the Criterion Independent Theatre. Beyond what noto- 
riety might indirectly accrue to the periodical instigating 
it, this effort to divorce our drama from the box-office 
had no other objects save artistic ones. Yet, had you 
heard the hullabaloo raised by the conservatives, by 
all the various partners in the league between managers, 
critics and newspapers to inflict an entirely commercial 



CRITICISM 309 

drama on the community, you would have thought we 
were nothing less than " second-story men." 

Even in our small circle there may have been black or 
dingy sheep ; but, in the main, we were all simply fight- 
ing for art and truth as we saw them. On that staff 
of the Criterion were assembled, among others, such 
men as Vance Thompson, Bliss Carman, Charles Henry 
Meltzer, Walter Blackburn Harte, Chas. F. Nird- 
linger and myself. The paper had been put editorially 
in charge of an Americanised Frenchman, Henri Dumay, 
and he applied — for perhaps the first and only time in 
the history of American journalism — the system of let- 
ting each man write just what he chose to write. As a 
result New York had, for about a year, the first paper 
that had been able to " make it sit up " since the earliest 
days of militant journalism. The paper had those qual- 
ities — on the importance of which in all critical writing 
I have so insisted throughout this book — personality, 
and prejudice. 

Eventually the paper succumbed to the increasing 
cowardice of its business managers. But it had not been 
wasted. It had shown what was possible. Never again 
could the croakers say that what the French do, we could 
not do also. Also, before the end came, we had our 
effort at an Independent Theatre, and — no small matter, 
we added materially to the score of our enemies. 

The history of one independent theatre differs but lit- 
tle from that of another. Whether it is that theatre which 
produced George Moore's " Bending of the Bough," or 
that one — in which I had share — which first produced 
Ibsen's " Borkmann " in America, or that Irish plan which 
included the poetry of W. B. Yeats ; they all run along 
similar grooves. Of ours I recall only that we took the 
old Madison Square Theatre on some occasions, the 
Berkeley Lyceum on others. In the former we gave 
" Borkmann," with the late E. J. Henley in the name- 
part. In the latter we gave the first American perform- 



310 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

ance of Echegaray's " El Gran Galeoto," from which 
Chas. F. Nirdlinger eventually made his admirable and 
successful play " The World and His Wife." If we had 
done nothing else than present those plays from the Span- 
ish and the Scandinavian, we surely accomplished some- 
thing. 

Our plans, of course, had been large. We had meant 
to draw upon the work of Becque, Strindberg, Porto- 
Riche, Brandes, Giacosa, and many others whose names 
were still Greek to our majority. Just as in our paper 
we were all many years ahead of the mob — I myself was 
already tiring of dinning G. B. Shaw into those who, 
ten years later, adopted him as the fashion ! — so in our 
theatre we were impertinently too soon. Our paper as- 
sumed all prospective losses ; we, the members of the staff, 
assumed literary control. We hoped to prove that the 
theatre had another mission than only to amuse. What 
else is the aim of that New Theatre which certain of our 
millionaires lately decided to support? 

Aside from artistic achievements the most pronounced 
result gained was the bitter opposition of the newspapers 
and managers. You would have thought, to listen to 
them, that we were the veriest rogues unhung. It is true 
there had, on the part of some of our crew, been some 
unnecessary truth-telling anent conditions in the theatre. 
Hard names had been called ; the dominance of the box- 
office had been pointed out in terms often more plain 
than pleasant. The gentlemen in charge of the box-offices 
fought back. And having all the heavy artillery and all 
the newspapers, naturally they prevailed. The most no- 
toriously venal of the critics eagerly espoused the con- 
quering cause; the New York newspaper whose reputa- 
tion for malice is as deserved as its brilliance is spurious 
was foremost in the fight for our suppression. No op- 
portunity to assail our integrity, and ridicule our achieve- 
ments, was lost. No petty invention was too low for 
these fellows who felt their safety somewhat shaken. If 



CRITICISM 311 

we had prevailed — Good Lord, such a thing as honest 
criticism might have become paramount in New York; 
and where would the pimps for " theatrical trusts " have 
been then? 

For that was one wing of the battle, our assault upon 
a so-called " trust " that seemed to dominate the scene. 
The battle has waged from time to time ever since ; one 
critic — James Metcalfe, who was also of our Criterion 
staff — even brought members of the trust into court, some 
years later, for refusing him entry into their theatres. 
The fight has often been obscured by changing of factions 
and positions ; there have been dissensions within the 
trust; again the seceders have joined the old cabal until 
the latter emerged more impregnable than ever. But 
however the conflict has fared, or if at all, — we began 
the first assault. For which, I may say, none of those 
gentlemen has ever been properly grateful. Indeed, I 
have often suspected that they cherished the memory of 
us with a vindictiveness worthy of a larger aim. 

It was in November, 1897, that our Independent Theatre 
made its bow. " Ted " Henley never again, I think, 
acted after that performance of " Borkmann." Fine ar- 
tist as he still was, his voice had already begun to show 
the corrosion of liquor. Consequently, he played the 
part of Ibsen's ruined tradesman, — typical whiner at fate 
— in a sort of hoarse whisper which by no means detracted 
from the realism of the scene. Curiously enough, Hen- 
ley himself had, as actor, reached that stage when he 
vapored lengthily of his successes and failures in the 
past, and became, indeed, tiresome enough with his curses 
at his luck. So you may appreciate the wit of James L. 
Ford's remark anent this performance. We were in the 
Fifth Avenue Hotel, cooling our throats between the acts. 

" What do you think of Borkmann ? " I asked him. 

"Borkmann," said Ford, "h — ! That's nothing but 
Ted Henley at the Gilsey House ! " 



312 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

It was in the bar-room of the latter inn that the actor 
had for years been airing his griefs. 

Whether we succeeded or failed — in any artistic analy- 
sis I think we succeeded — one thing at least we ever 
maintained: a high standard for both the theatre and its 
literature. 

The apparent ease with which both these arts can be 
attempted constitute their greatest tragedy. Good looks 
in woman, notoriety in man ; these seem the only essential 
passports to the theatre and the library. Technique is 
never thought of. That is what has saved music from a 
like calamity. The mere fool, the transparent charlatan, 
can go but a slight distance in music. Knowledge of 
technique is essential in both artist and critic. As a re- 
sult we are not, in music, so hopelessly mired as in the 
other arts. We have, there, some real critics. 

Whom have we in the theatre or in literature? 

If we hesitate in answering that question, it is be- 
cause the polite Nancies who object to censure have, so 
far, succeeded in preventing real criticism. Yet it is cen- 
sure we must have. Far better if a few worthy artists 
are wrongfully censured than that the mass of incom- 
petents go free. The critic must first impress upon the 
public that he is fit to judge; there must be in his judg- 
ments, his expressions of them, the something that will 
convince his readers he has license to sit upon the critical 
bench. That achieved, it is his province to use the posi- 
tion with all the rigor of a hanging judge. If by the 
fortune of his own endowments he has made sure of the 
attention of his audience ; if he have the manner to com- 
pel attention ; then must he never lose sight of his course's 
primal clause, namely, that he must protect the reading 
public from those who would prey on its time, ruin its 
taste, and debauch its intelligence. 

That I have said this over and over, in this book, I 



CRITICISM 313 

know as well as you; it is the burden of my song; it is 
what I must impress on you, I must even with Lewis Car- 
roll " do it again and again." 

Despite the increasing hysteria in the American tem- 
perament I still think there is sturdy honesty enough left 
to ensure victory to those critics who judge, rather than 
to those who echo, the publishers. 

I have named the impersonal standard as no longer per- 
tinent in American criticism. To be most impressive — 
indeed, to be of any vital effect — criticism must ever 
be the expression of a purely personal opinion. If you 
carry that argument to its logical conclusion, you will 
find that all this present case is but my apology for my 
own beliefs and writings. 

Right ! If I did not think that there may come again 
in America a public for criticism that has in it something 
of creation, for critics who guard the gate instead of 
holding it agape, I would surely never write another 
line in my life. Surely the nation is not yet so sodden 
in riches and content, that honesty and high thinking 
are become impossible? Much as I may in this book 
inveigh against the prevalence of other factors in our 
critical literature, if I did not think a turn for the better 
still possible — well, the laurels of a Don Quixote never 
appealed to me. 

Do you remember what Emerson reported as one of 
Wordsworth's favorite topics? The Lake poet repeated, 
time and again, of our American society, that it 
was being " enlightened by a superficial tuition, out 
of all proportion to its being restrained by moral cul- 
ture." 

Barring that the word " enlightened " is carelessly 
used ; since he really meant " benighted " ; that sentence 
sketches precisely the picture on which I have tried to 
insist. A society utterly without taste in language or 
letters ; a growing generation in the proletariat whose 
speech is an amalgam of mongrel European-English and 



314 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

profanity ; and a moral sense knowing the dictates only 
of money-bags at one extreme and Mafia societies at the 
other. 

To deal with these problems they ask us to wear kid 
gloves ! 

What is needed is the mailed fist. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

The domain of the theatre has more than once af- 
forded arguments pointing to the lamentable state to 
which criticism has brought American literature. For, 
if I have done anything at all in these pages, I have 
shown that the prevailing " prosperity boom " in " best 
sellers " has nothing to do with literature. The hacks 
and the time-servers may be getting rich; honest artists 
are, if anything, in worse straits than before. 

It was those honest workmen I had in mind when, some 
time since, I found myself contrasting, somewhat un- 
happily, the difference between author and actor. It was 
at a moment when the public was being implored once 
again for contributions to the maintenance of a Home 
for Aged and Infirm American Actors. The theatric 
pages of our newspapers were filled with this benevolent 
enterprise; many kept subscription lists open; editorial 
encouragement to our philanthropy was not lacking. 

The actor, in short, whether active and full of pos- 
tures, or infirm and feeble, is ever with us. And where, 
meanwhile, are the authors to whom these players owe 
their bread and butter? (Again let me insist: I do not 
write of the exceptional fortunates who have lately been 
allowed to share in the " prosperity.") Was there ever, 
outside of France, an individual, or a newspaper, so rash 
as to propose a Home for Aged and Infirm Authors ? 

The absurdity in this is but seeming. The actors who 
gather prosperity from the general inability to tell art 
from noise are many; the authors who, with all the wind 
blown into their sails by our " press-agents of pros- 
perity," manage to make a decent wage from letters, are 
few and far between. It is true that the lot of the 



316 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

canny trader upon the publisher's demands is to-day fairly 
enviable — we have seen how it occasionally runs to motor- 
cars, estates in the country, and villas in Versailles — but 
the workman who will not cut his cloth for the market 
is in no better case than before. And even counting in 
the exceptions with the rules, compared to the pages on 
pages devoted to mummers in our public prints — what is 
the special literature of the bookish but a drop in the 
bucket ? 

The very ratio in which the principals to a new pla} r 
are advertised tells the tale. First we are given the name 
of the speculator who is to produce the play, as the jar- 
gon has it; who furnishes the money and the authority. 
His name is writ largest on the bills ; as if, forsooth, in 
buying the article he had become its creator. (That is 
the infantile reasoning whereby the late millionaire Whit- 
ney, buying the favorite for the Derby, thought to 
achieve reputation as a sportsman.) Next in importance 
comes the actor, the fellow who repeats what another in- 
vented. That other, least and last, is the author. In- 
deed, often the author is not mentioned at all. 

What is true of the advertisement, is also true of the 
actual bill-of-the-play ; there you discover the name of 
the costumer as easily as that of the author. As in 
print, so in the visual life of the town. The actor ob- 
structs the view. We may escape them in print, or even 
in the play-house ; but if we venture to take the air we 
run a risk; the mummer's strange and noisome apparel 
and habit confront us at almost every turn of certain 
urban districts. 

In all this there is nothing new ; neither the conditions 
nor documents on them appeal to the Athenian in us. 
Of all living creatures the actor, we know, is the most 
like the butterfly. His vogue passes and — nothing is 
left. He is a mere shell; a thing used, all its life, as a 
reed through which to blow the words, the poses and 
the sensations of others. The lowest of the arts, if one 



CRITICISM 317 

at all, George Moore called it; Augustine Birrell denied 
the worthiness of the actor's calling. The author of 
" Masques and Mummers " tried to believe that " the ex- 
altation of the puppet over the wit and ingenuity that 
give him the semblance of vitality was an exponent of 
conditions that, happily, are passing," but he knew, as 
he wrote, that he was but believing what he wished to 
believe. Those conditions increase rather than pass. The 
vanity of the actor is to-day more immeasurable than 
ever before. 

Let an author run counter to the mummer's vanity, 
and all the machinery at the mummer's disposal will be 
used to rebuke him. Once, I remember, having con- 
tributed to a play the slight detail of writing every line 
of it, I had a telling little experience of my own. 

April, 1907, saw the Broadway production of the piece. 
The critics were almost unanimous in condemning, among 
other factors, the casting and the acting. After I 
thought the worst of the tumult and the shouting over — 
in ten days or so after the first-night — I looked in to 
see for myself. The critics, for once, were quite right. 
The play was doomed the moment the parts were cast. 
I need name but one detail: the leading actor was what 
is known as a " character-actor " whose almost perfect 
English had yet an ineradicable trace of f oreignness ; the 
piece had, at his disposal, a " character " part, full of 
foreign turns and dialect. Did he take that part? By 
no means. And why? It is almost too absurd; but — 
friends of the toady type so frequent in actor-land had 
told him that he was the legitimate rival to — John Drew ! 
And he had believed it! Which might have stirred me 
to greater laugher if my own play had not been used 
for the experiment. It was as if Yvette Guilbert at- 
tempted the mantle of Ellen Terry. 

Whether the play was bad enough to fail in any event 
we had no chance to discover; it was doomed before it 
was put on. The critics, as I said, were quite right. 



318 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

But when I myself vented a little chagrin publicly; when 
I called attention to what Bernard Shaw once declared 
the difference between the " literary play " and the " act- 
ing play," — namely, that in the former the actors had to 
act, while in the latter the play acted for them — it was 
at once made clear to me that the only attitude expected 
of the average playwright towards the public perform- 
ance of his work is that of the press-agent. What others 
declare aloud, he must not so much as whisper; even 
though it is his own artistic property which is being 
ruined. Let the author be ruined; as long as the actor's 
vanity is unruffled, what's the odds? 

In conserving the mummer's vanity our American pro- 
totype of what used to be known in Germany as the 
Backfisch has had potent share. You may call her Mati- 
nee Girl, or Young Person from Westchester, or what you 
like; she is eternally the same. Her judgments have 
ever been obvious and sensual, in the finer sense. Imi- 
tative herself, she has yet had other imitators. She has 
originated nothing. In one year she apes the outlines 
of C. D. Gibson, in another a Christy serves her as 
model, and in yet another her ideal is a " Fluffy Ruffles " 
— which by no more than onomatopoeia indicates an 
omega of brainlessness. She thinks only in groups ; in- 
dividually her mind is a palimpsest. Though gowned in 
the newest mode, as created by others, mentally she is as 
blank as a mirror or an echo. 

Nothing to be submitted against the American wor- 
ship of players is more forcible than the Matinee Girl's 
devotion to them. Other writers have already set forth 
fully many other moot questions, — of the actor's being 
still morally the vagabond he once was legally, and of 
the nonsense between Church and Stage. The peculiarly 
American feature is the Matinee Girl. She goes to the 
play only for the sake of a handsome player or beautiful 
dresses. The author, for her, does not exist. In two 



CRITICISM 319 

decades of " first-nights " I never found a woman who, of 
her own accord, made effort to discover the name of the 
author. Sometimes, when a fashion already existed; 
when the newspapers had given notoriety to this or that 
name ; she might know it, and mouth it glibly as a parrot ; 
but spontaneously — never. She might be as enthusiastic 
as you please on this player or that gown, that scene or 
that melody ; but on the question of literary skill she 
was entirely blank. 

This same bit of budding womanhood would exclaim 
to you gushingly upon the newest " best seller " and its 
author. The tone in which she asks you if you have 
read it implies that otherwise you will fall in her esteem. 
The different manner in which she approaches the stage 
and the novel is not, however, essentially contradictory; 
there is no intelligence employed; it is indeed merely 
a manner, just as there have been manners in shaking 
hands or putting down one's hat. To consider the actor 
happened to be the fashion ; that was all ; so was the sur- 
face familiarity with the names of novelists ; the fashion 
of knowing the name of the playwright makes but slow 
progress. 

The ranks of the Matinee Girl are recruited from no 
special social class : she signifies the mental trend of 
all that vast majority which takes its opinions whole- 
sale. 

When the player himself is no longer active — when 
the glare of publicity about him dims a little; when his 
performances and his intentions, his habits and his jour- 
neyings can no longer weary us because Time is drop- 
ping the curtain on him — does he sink to obscurity or 
poverty, as do less favored artists? By no means. For 
his age and his infirmity a flourishing Home exists. 

With the atmosphere of such a Home it would be 
entertaining to let the imagination play. " Did you ever 



320 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

see me in my great part," says one old man, " my great 

part, that the town went mad over? " 

" Let me see," quavers the other dotard, " what was the 

name of the play?" 

The first ancient, frowning tragically, vouchsafes: 

" The play was ' Peter and Paul,' and my part 

was " 

The other, tactlessly interrupting, bobs his old 

head: 

" Yes, yes : ' Peter and Paul.' Who wrote the thing? " 
" I have forgotten," says the great has-been, and turns 

gloomily away. 

As most actors forget, so do we, too ; and many of us 
never knew. For the author who is also artist there is, 
at best, a bare living, some barren renown, and then — 
what? Legal contentions, after his death, about his 
miserable copyrights. 

Why not as logically, then, an Author's Home? It 
is not impossible; Europe in Italy, and the Riviera, has 
already done something in this direction. If Europe needs 
such an asylum, America needs one still more. In our 
prevailing " boom " in letters, not to write becomes a 
distinction ; the mere numbers of those attempting the 
profession of pen and ink — let us not, in this detail, call 
it an art ! — inevitably make for a large proportion of 
those whom physically, as well mentally, we shall pres- 
ently have to class as " infirm and aged." Should there 
not be as much provision for the writers as for those, 
their mere mouthpieces, who have waxed fat off them? 

When the Actors' Home was still inviting subscriptions, 
I recall that a glance at the list filled me, anew, with 
the sense of Literature's slender prosperity. Where, in 
the ranks of writers, publishers, and readers, could you 
have found such evidence of liberality? Vagabonds, per- 
haps ; but not misers, these mummers ; let us grant them 



CRITICISM 321 

that! Was not the fund started by a prominent man- 
ager's cheque for ten thousand dollars? What with 
genuine goodfellowship, and a little advertisement to 
be had from the publicity given the subscription lists, 
players and playgoers responded freely. 

You could find humor, too, in those lists. These two 
items, I recall, elbowed each other: Tony Pastor, $500; 
Richard Mansfield, $250. The perennial Mr. Pastor, you 
see, whose music-hall talents had worn an opera-hat for 
so many years, could afford to double the donation of the 
player who, whatever else his enemies denied him, tried 
annually to produce a new play. If Mr. Mansfield had 
done nothing else, did he not deserve the thanks of the 
English-speaking world by playing so admirably at 
least two plays by Bernard Shaw, long before the fashion 
for that writer reached, in America, its somewhat ab- 
surd point? 

Again let us take an anecdotic excursion: 

Mr. Mansfield's joy in the profits from " The Devil's 
Disciple " was marred by somewhat too much of public 
praise for the author. 

" Shaw, Shaw," exclaimed Mr. Mansfield, " I hear of 
nothing but the brilliant Mr. Shaw. It is rather tire- 
some." 

" For shame, Dick," said the player's wife, " look at 
the money we are making from the piece. You are un- 
grateful. You should go down on your knees and thank 
the Lord for so good a play." 

"I do, my dear, I do," said Mr. Mansfield, "but I 
add: Oh, Lord, why did it have to be by Shaw? " 

The case of Mr. Mansfield, seriously considered, must 
ever constitute a curious page in the history of the arts 
in America. And inasmuch as I know, on this subject, 
some intimate and suggestive matters, I shall presently 
devote to it an entire chapter. Let us return to com- 
parison of the mummer and the author. 



322 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

We have seen that the profession of writing is not as 
ill-paid as it was. But with rewards competition, too, 
has increased. What with the starring system borrowed 
from the theatre, and the cheap fecundity of the incom- 
petents, the real artist is still likely, at the end of many 
years' devotion to his Muse, to find himself but poorly 
paid. It is given only to the few to have, like Mr. 
Hopkinson Smith, the sister arts of painting and archi- 
tecture to supplement the art of words. You may re- 
member that a prominent publisher cannily advised an 
author to have other employment; you may recall, too, 
Mr. Bierce's retort. The majority of writers must ever, 
for eking out the meagre income from letters, turn to 
journalism. For an honest gentleman journalism is 
merely, as the author of " Intentions " put it, the old 
vulgarity writ large. The most striking instance of the 
death-in-life that journalism means for a man of letters 
is that of Walter Harte, the essayist; there, too, we 
have the most telling argument for just such a Home for 
Authors as I here spin theories about. Had such ex- 
isted Walter Harte need not have died. 

Mr. Harte wrote that " in spite of all the literary ac- 
tivity and the intellectual restlessness of our time, there 
are not probably more than half a dozen writers in the 
United States who follow literature, pure and simple, as 
a profession ; and it is noteworthy that among these 
there are neither poets nor essayists — the backbone of 
belles-lettres." 

That was written within the decade ; the man who wrote 
it is dead ; but unless you wish to say " a dozen " for his 
" half," not a line in the indictment need be changed for 
to-day. 

Pure literature may provide cake ; but not bread and 
butter. 

Walter Harte tried to live by literature ; he was driven 
to journalism; he died of it. Already I quoted some 



CRITICISM 323 

of the things he said about the " literary brigandage " 
necessary in " the masked service of journalism." Not 
even Stevenson more terribly arraigned the modern news- 
paper than did " Some Masks and Faces " in " Medita- 
tions in Motley." Yet, half a dozen years after that, 
the finest book of American essays in our time, was 
printed, the author was dead. He who had written so 
splendidly of " Prejudice " found but one place where 
the sword of prejudice was not sharp against him: the 
grave. 

Harte was of the study; his writings and his life were 
one struggle against the various little gods of our Grub 
Street. He was an analyst who, sitting in the shadows 
of seclusion, pricked the world's bubbles. His career was 
one combat against odds. It is true that he had, in the 
words of the worldly, often only himself to blame. Of 
all men he knew least of compromise, or of cutting his 
cloth. He refused to try success by way of sycophancy. 
Indeed, I have known him refuse to adapt himself even 
to friendship. That, perhaps, was one secret of his 
failure: he would not adapt himself. For, in the world's 
eye, he remains a failure; though the book he wrote is 
better than tons of best sellers. 

A friend of his and mine, anxious to serve Harte, came 
to me once with a shrug. " The man's impossible," he 
said. " I asked him to do me a thousand words on any- 
thing he liked, and he sent me an article to fill two is- 
sues of my paper." Hypochondriac as he was, Harte took 
this sort of thing as but another of those blows of fate 
he was so used to. If he had been asked the reason for 
his action in the matter of the editor's order, he would 
have averred that he could treat no subject decently in 
less space than he had taken ; to limit himself to the 
absurd exigencies of this or that paper was to tamper 
with the spirit of his art. That was the whole secret, 
in fine: he was a man meant only for books. In an age 
when books can often be written only by those who 



324 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

keep the wolf away by journalism, there was no room 
for Walter Harte. 

You have only to open " Meditations in Motley " any- 
where to find the bookman, not the writer of marketable 
trifles. Once enamored of his subject, he needed room; 
like the Nilghai in " The Light that Failed " he took a 
a mile to turn in. As result, however, we had from him 
essays profound, sincere, and as artistically composed as 
any of Montaigne's or Lamb's. In his book were no 
dainty vaultings into the subject over the "happy." 
quotation that would smack of the dilettante or the scho- 
liast ; no delicate titivations of the text, after the manner 
of a Miss Repplier; no summing up of the whole matter 
in the space of a few coruscant pages, to fill you with 
amaze at the author's cleverness, and to convince you — 
like Mr. Saltus — of nothing. He was ever serious ; his 
essays had the ancient, Fleet Street manner; you might 
say, if you misliked him, that he had the Johnsonian 
heaviness of touch. 

I wonder where, to-day, you will buy a copy of " Medi- 
tations in Motley " ? The last letter I ever had from 
Harte told me the remnants of that edition, so abomi- 
nably mishandled by the " Arena " of Boston, were in his 
garret, intended for burning up. Yet, as a real speci- 
men in " belles lettres " that was one of perhaps half a 
dozen books America has had in twenty years! 

Walter Harte was for years assistant editor of the 
New England Magazine, and much of his best writing lies 
buried in these files ; it was in his department, " In a 
Corner at Dodsley's," that he printed his appreciation of 
Ambrose Bierce, which, for some years, was the only 
Eastern recognition accorded the author of " In the Midst 
of Life." From that magazine, he passed to the " Arena." 
Eventually he added a venture of his own to that pam- 
phlet movement, among the younger men, which, oc- 
curring about 1895, was one of the rare signs of in- 



CRITICISM 325 

tellectual revolution that America has seen in our time. 
The " Fly-leaf " was the name of this tiny monthly mouth- 
piece for his own artistic individuality. In the success 
of that venture Harte probably found the greatest happi- 
ness he knew. 

The " Fly-leaf's " success aroused the envy of another 
pamphleteer. Elbert Hubbard eventually persuaded 
Harte to incorporate the " Fly-leaf " with his own pam- 
phlet; Harte left Boston, and joined energies with Hub- 
bard. The partnership was not happy ; it lasted eighteen 
days. Its dissolution left the " Fly-leaf " dead. 

He never really recovered from the destruction of his 
" Fly-leaf." He wrecked his health in the strain of news- 
paper reporting. If, in 1894, he had written to me that 
letter, from which on page ... I have already 
quoted the passage beginning "... I am alive, 
" you may imagine what it meant for him, after 
having reached individual independence, mental and ma- 
terial, to be plunged again into reportorial buccaneering. 
He fought against illness, and misfortune, and died, I 
fear, confirmed most bitterly in that sad philosophy 
of despair which even his brightest moments merely 



He had not, perhaps, the talent for happiness. Easily 
enough it was to dismiss him as " a queer fellow." Even 
those who best understood him saw him but seldom, and 
it was never possible to be merry with him. His pale 
face, and the constant hint he gave of one whose spirit 
far outshone his body, made him not unlike the Hamlet 
whom we see played as a thin and pallid person. No ; 
not a happy man, or one to make others happy. Yet 
wit and irony sparkle in his pages, and for an intelli- 
gent person there is as much entertainment in " Medita- 
tions in Motley " as in any volume of Montaigne. Sel- 
dom, in my time, has so promising a man of letters been 
so hardly used by fate. 

His book was dedicated to the Devil and Dame Chance 



326 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

" the two most potent deities in literary fortunes." That 
bit of truthtelling was never forgiven him by either. 

Students of literature have seen this type recur in every 
age. He preferred the gloom of the study to any social 
intercourse; when the world went wrong with him, he 
found a corner, and there — ended. 

Had there been such a Home for Authors, such a man 
need not have died in need and want. I do not say 
that he would have been an easy person to induce to such 
seclusion ; but, even if it had been necessary to shift his 
sick-bed bodily, there might have been something for him 
less sad than dying like a rat in a hole. 

Into the question of the temperamental differences be- 
tween the author and the actor, the qualities of sensitive- 
ness and shame which, in the author, keep him from ac- 
cepting what an actor might claim as his due, there is 
no need to go. Doubtless even the author who had been 
most commercial in his activities, might, with distress and 
infirmity laying hold on him, be a difficult person to lure 
into even the most ideally planned Home. Superinten- 
dence, management, of such an institution, would entail 
nothing less than genius. Into all this it would be futile 
to go ; my argument is simply that there is no valid 
reason why, if for the lesser artist such provision be 
made, the greater should be without it. A very plain 
example of logic, and an excuse, in general, for com- 
paring the public's attitudes towards the two arts in 
question. 

Turning from the melancholy case of Walter Harte, 
we find even in the cheery pages of Stevenson an occa- 
sional hint of the poor sort of happiness that comes to 
the artist in letters. Here was a man whom a genera- 
tion held the type of the pure artist, yet he said of him- 
self that if it had not been for his health, " which made 
it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive 



CRITICISM 327 

myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace 
trade when I was young, which might have now sup- 
ported me during these ill years." In gayer mood, to be 
sure, he admitted that writers were but Daughters of 
Pleasure, and made their bread by their enjoyment. Even 
to that he added: " But it is not all primroses, some of 
it is brambly, and most of it is uphill." Yet who had 
drunk deeper of the joy of art than Stevenson? Did 
he not die full of it? 

As for the permanence of delight afforded by authors 
and actors there can be but slight compare. For the 
mummer who merely shows a changing set of masks, we 
may conceive admiration, but hardly much affection. For 
the man behind the book, on the other hand, the stir of 
gratitude should spring. Take out of the world what it 
owes to literature, and what a void is there? Take out 
what we owe to actors, and what is lost? The memory 
of this gesture, that grimace, or such a tone of the voice. 
The words, the kernel of that husk, would still be there. 
We still could take the page and let our fancy 
pose the dramatic gestures for ourselves. But take 
away the poetry, the essays, the tragedies, and the ro- 
mance, of all the great deeps of letters, and how poor 
the world would be ! The debt to authors is so vast, so 
infinite, that one can nowise compute it. 

If to an author come the accident of ill luck, of pov- 
erty, of illness — what sign is there in all the world that 
anyone cares? The greater the privacy the artist kept, 
the less will any aid come to him in misfortune. While 
the vogue is on, while the papers kindle the flame of a 
brief renown, we may pretend an interest; the moment a 
new idol comes we seldom even ask " What has become 
of Yesterman ? " and we really do not care what the 
answer is. 

What, then, is so ridiculous about our doing for our 
authors what long ago was done for actors? This great 



328 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

democracy has justly been accused of caring too little for 
the arts ; such an institution as we have been dreaming of 
would go far to wipe out that stain. Though you could 
not drag into it with wild horses even the most miserable 
of all the writing wreckage — even if the place stood al- 
ways empty ; as a mere memorial, it would atone for much. 

If you have gone beyond our city walls no farther than 
to the Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island, you will 
see how easily the world may repay, in comfort, what 
has been given to it in vitality. If our bodies have often 
owed debts to the deep-sea sailor — now as we actually 
sailed abroad, now as we merely consumed the staple 
come from overseas — how much more have not our spirits 
owed to the author? Are there, then, no green spots in 
this vast land of ours where a patch of Nature's great 
garden of peace might not be set aside for such a pur- 
pose? Is it indeed so absurd? Though pride might bar 
the gates of such a place to many needing its shelter, 
yet the mere fact of its existence would count some- 
thing. 

If, at the end of all endeavor, there loomed such a 
haven of rest as Stevenson crossed the world to find, what 
present buffets of fate would not the man of letters 
gladly brave? Physical failure, to which Stevenson early 
accustomed himself, is not infrequently the writer's por- 
tion ; the fashion of robustness and out-door life can- 
not include all men ; and those who, like Stevenson, have 
wrought for themselves a mountain home to die in, can 
be counted in a breath. Stevenson once told Edmund 
Gosse that, if ever he had a garden, he should like it 
to be empty, just a space to walk and talk in, with no 
flowers to need a gardener nor fine lawns to be mown. 
Even so, for such Aged and Infirm Author as our specu- 
lation now plays with, there need be but a space to walk 
and talk in, — a space much occupied, perhaps by ghosts, 
yet redolent throughout of the gratitude of a sometime 
careless public. 






CRITICISM 329 

Return again to material, rather than sentimental de- 
tails. It is there that we find emphasised the blessings 
our world has for the mummer, as against the oblivion 
accorded him who gave the mummer words. 

In that list of subscriptions for an Actors' Home, the 
first cheque came from a manager; the others from every 
branch in the theatre's employ, to say nothing of the 
millionaires whose spouses came from the stage. 

To equal this, it would be necessary for an Authors' 
Home to have as its first founder a publisher. On what 
corner oY Fifth Avenue shall we find him? Or where are 
the scores on scores of writing men, who, like the actors, 
can afford to sign gaily checks for three figures? For 
the publishers, in any event, there would be no decent 
excuse ; they make, on the average, nine-tenths of all pro- 
ceeds ; theatrical managers rarely exact such large per- 
centage. Often enough the publisher, having contracted 
to issue an edition of, say a thousand, binds up exactly 
enough to recoup himself, and a little more, for his out- 
lay; after that, the author is amazed to find that the 
rest of the edition is left " in sheets," — so much sheer 
waste. I could give you names of gentry who thrive on 
these methods. Can you imagine them subscribing to an 
Authors' Home? Only if they were reincarnated, and 
this time with a conscience. 

Yet the thing is not impossible. If that prosperity in 
writer-land is not all a dream, there should be one or two 
successful prose-peddlers able to sign decent cheques. For 
such clubs as The Lambs, The Players, or The Strollers, 
are there not, in New York alone, The Lotos, The Gro- 
lier, The Salmagundi, and The Press? It would be the 
newspapers who could make or mar the project, just as 
they have made — or marred — the conditions such a Home 
might assuage. It is the newspapers who could remind 
the public that though many authors are, like Stevenson, 
" ordered South," he is the only one easy to cite as 
coming to his life's conclusion under his own roof and 



330 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

fig-tree. We may prate as we please of the increase in 
average well-being; some there will always be, like Wal- 
ter Harte, who would rather die than be mere purveyors 
in the market-place, or — forced to it, at last, lest de- 
pendents suffer — would die of that same commerce. 

It is as easy to ridicule the whole fantastic scheme as 
to insist, perpetually, on the impossibility of bending the 
literary temperament to it. Authors are no more vic- 
tims of " the artistic temperament " than actors or mu- 
sicians. Verdi, we know, at a cost to himself of twenty 
thousand pounds or so, founded in Italy a Home for 
Musicians. Where, in logic, is the argument that shall 
deny our writers equal opportunities? 

It rests — I cannot insist enough — with the newspapers. 
In their service innumerable good men have disappeared, 
used up, unheard of; it is the newspapers who exact, in 
return for such bread and butter as they furnish, so 
heavy a moral premium. As in literature, so in actual 
journalism; only the few reach great salaries, wide-reach- 
ing renown, or national importance; against those there 
are thousands who grind themselves to death, day and 
night, for a pittance. In few other occupations is more 
body and soul exhausted daily; each morrow asks new 
efforts ; yesterday's accomplishments are, in the news- 
paper, as if they had never been. Bernard Shaw wrote 
whimsically once of his inability to face the degradation 
of " serving up the weekly paper of five years ago as a 
novelty " in form of a book ; he saw it looming before 
him as a " laborer sees the workhouse " ; and, eventually, 
he succumbed, his " Dramatic Opinions and Essays " be- 
ing the result. 

But it need not be a " workhouse " that our fantasy 
is building for the Aged and Infirm. Let but our news- 
papers do as much for the old age of writers, as for their 
youth and prime they have done ill — and possibly pos- 
terity could forgive them, 



CHAPTER SIX 

If in the preceding pages you have discovered any- 
thing of animosity toward mummers, you have mistaken 
logic for prejudice. I simply think no more highly of 
the average actor than of the average author. One need 
have no prejudice whatever; need only, like the abomi- 
nably maligned Machiavelli, see things as they are rather 
than as they might be; and the average actor and his 
art will loom no higher — than I rated them. The aver- 
age in that sort of human puppet does nothing that the 
phonograph or the kinetoscope cannot do almost as well. 
In even his most effective activities there is hardly more 
intelligence than the parrot and the monkey display in 
their imitations. 

Opinion upon the theatre is not simply an exercise of 
the imagination with me, as you will have learned from 
my connection with an Independent Theatre movement. 
But that alone might not have justified definite opinions 
about the intelligence of the mummer average. It is be- 
cause I knew — as intimately as, I believe, it was possible 
— -the one American mummer who towered far above the 
average that I maintain my title to discuss the genus. 

The one undisputed genius the American theatre knew 
since Booth was Richard Mansfield. 

Much as I had written, in other years, about the thea- 
tre, the men and women of the theatre had been my 
slightest concern. That when I came to know one player 
well, he should be the one great homme de theatre of our 
time in America — that, once again, proves that some for- 
tune in misfortune dwells. 

This man, then, I saw something of in fairly intimate 
331 



332 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

private ways. For all of one season I was in his service. 
I saw him at rehearsals ; where the newspapers painted 
him such a ruffian. We shared the same roof; we broke 
bread together. In his New York house, and " on the 
road," we foregathered. In his family relations, and 
his relations with his company of actors ; in every public 
and private relation of his life, I have been with him. 
We quarreled, eventually, as did nearly all who dealt 
with him; about a play written for him we came to dis- 
sensions; but never — thank Conscience! — have I joined 
the army of petty souls who, while he lived or after he 
died, never tired of mallice and uncharitableness toward 
him. 

Now — here is what allows of my allusion to the sub- 
ject — even in the case of this great genius, the clearest- 
eyed observer could not decide how much was there of 
individuality, how much of imitation. Was that a soul? 
Or was it but a palimpsest? 

Before we come to some effort at solution of that rid- 
dle, let me recall some memories of the man. 

This is not the place to rehearse the story of his 
achievements ; it is notorious enough that he loomed head 
and shoulders above all the rest of America's players, 
for which they cordially hated him. He was, no doubt, 
the most hated man of his time. The truth was, he was 
too clever for them ; he expected of his actors the one 
thing they lack: intelligence. When their lack showed 
too barely, he spoke his mind about it — a scintillant, 
searing mind. Yet he did much for his profession ; he 
constantly rehearsed new plays, employed innumerable 
actors. Even towards authors he stands mountains 
higher than that fine old fossil, Joseph Jefferson, who 
spent on royalties to live playwrights that fine old sum, 
a zero. Mansfield did not disgorge his royalties easily ; 
but at least he incurred them easily. 

Knowing that trait of his, Miss Mary Stone and I 
insisted on having a written contract from him before 



CRITICISM 333 

we delivered the full MS. of the dramatic version of that 
saccharine story, " The First Violin " — though it was 
already in rehearsal; and when he refused, and called the 
play his property, we kept our play, saying he might 
have what other person he liked do a version, but ours 
he could not have. He did; and there was some money 
made; but, though we had thought it impossible to write 
a worse play than ours, that other person succeeded in 
producing much greater nonsense than ours. However, 
my point is this : because of a difference of financial opin- 
ion with Mansfield, I never saw why I should suddenly 
declare he was no genius. 

If he had not been a genius he might have been more 
popular. 

Even at this slight remove of time it is hard to imagine 
the amazing version of the man which the newspapers 
promulgated, and the public liked to consider authentic. 
A volume could be filled with anecdotes about him ; most 
of them malicious. Few have written of how brilliant a 
gentleman he could be ; how he could talk all things to all 
men; how varied was his learning, and how fascinatingly 
he could express it. In short, besides being an actor, he 
was a gentleman and a scholar, and his inferiors for- 
gave him neither. I recall a dinner at his table ; of the 
three that sat over the wine afterwards I am the 
sole survivor, for Paul Leicester Ford was the other 
guest. 

One secret of their hating him, I think, was this : he 
never veiled his disregard for his mental inferiors. There, 
doubtless, he lacked being the true gentleman. His intel- 
lectual arrogance made him impatient of stupidity. But 
he knew vastly well with whom to " try on " his ironic 
speeches, and with whom not to. 

The public's opinion of him did sometimes weigh on 
him. Let me quote to you, here, from a letter he wrote 
to me in October, 1896, which has never been made public 
before : 



334 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

" Behold me in future playing only good men and lovers 
and loveable creatures, like that dear amiable, open-hearted, 
open-handed, joy-distributing Jefferson, or the merry, bounc- 
ing, rollicking Sol Smith Russell, or that extravagant gay 
young dog Francis Wilson, or that panacea for all ills Crane, 
or that beau-ideal of all romantic covers Drew, or the im- 
petuous, tempestuous Sothern — yes, I have three plays ready 
to follow " Sombras " — and they are all bright, cheerful 
themes, and in two I am the lover! We have had the new 
woman — now I will give the world — the new lover ! Announce 
it! . . . Yours always, 

" Richard Mansfield." 



Even the newspapers, when this man died, admitted 
that he was " the greatest actor of his hour, and one of 
the greatest of all times." And him, for my too slight 
deserts, it was given me to know — and not to know the 
others ; and in that particular, as in my having had 
Ambrose Bierce as friend, and not the others, I have 
had so much fortune that there is no excuse for repining. 

My association with Mansfield gave me that chance to 
search for the mumming soul which enables me now to 
write of it not too vaguely. What that search resulted 
in I set down, but slightly embellished, in a far too bril- 
liant satire called " The Imitator." Since you are sure 
never to have read that book, let me here make from its 
caricature of the mumming temperaments such extracts 
as will serve the present purpose: 

Arthur Wantage . . . had not yet, that season, de- 
livered himself of a curtain speech. His curtain speeches 
were wont to be insults delivered in an elaborately honeyed 
manner; he took the pose of considering his audiences with 
contempt; he admired himself far more for his condescension 
in playing to them than he respected his audiences for having 
the taste to admire him. . . . The secret of his hatred 
for O'Deigh was the secret of his hatred for all dramatists. 



criticism sm 

He was a curious compound of egoism, childishness and 
shrewdness. Part of his shrewdness — or was it his childish- 
ness? — showed in his aversion to paying authors' royalties. 
He always tried to re-write all the plays he accepted. . . . 
When he could find no writers willing to make him a present 
of plays, for the sake, as he put it, of having it done by 
as eminent an actor as himself, and in so beautiful a theatre, 
he was in the habit of announcing that he would forsake the 
theatre, and turn critic. . 

The riddle of Arthur Wantage's character had never yet 
been read. There were those who averred he was never doing 
anything but acting, not in the most intimate moments of his 
life; some called him a keen money-maker, retaining the 
mummer's pose off the stage for the mere effect of it on 
press and public. What the man's really honest, unrehearsed 
thoughts were, — or if he ever had such — no man could 
say. . . . This man who came out before the curtain now 
as this, now as that, character of fancy or history, what 
shred of vital, individual personality had he retained through 
all these changings? . . . The vanity, the egoism of this 
player were so obvious, so transparent, so blatant. Vane 
wondered, more than ever, what was under that mask of ar- 
rogance and conceit. The perfect frankness of it made it 
almost admirable. . . . 

" Actors " (said Wantage) " are sheep, simply sheep. The 
papers say I am a brute at rehearsals. My dear Vane, I 
swear to you that if Nero were in my place he would mas- 
sacre all the minor actors in the land. And they expect the 
salaries of intelligent persons ! " 

Vane, listening, wondered why Wantage, under such an 
avalanche of irritations, continued such life. Gradually it 
dawned on him that all this fume and fret was merely part 
of the man's mummery; it was his appeal to the sympathy 
of his audience; his argument against the reputation his 
occasional exhibitions of rage and waywardness had given 
him. 

Vane's desire to penetrate the surface of this conscious 
imitator, this fellow who slipped off this character to as- 
sume that, grew keener and keener. Where, under all this 
crust of alien form and action, was the individual, human, 
thought and feeling? Or was there any left? Had the con- 



336 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

stant corrosion of simulated emotions burnt out all the orig- 
inal character of the mind? 

And here, finally, was the curtain-speech indulged in: 

When he finally condescended to stride before the curtain 
again, it was with a lift of the eyebrows, a little gesture, 
an air that said, quite plainly: Really, it is very annoying 
of you. If I were not very gracious indeed I should refuse 
to come out again. I do so, I assure you, under protest. He 
gave a little, delicate cough, he lifted his eyes. At that the 
house became still, utterly still. He began without any voca- 
tive at all. 

" The actor," he said, " who wins the applause of so dis- 
tinguished a company is exceedingly fortunate. The applause 
of such a very distinguished company " — he succeeded in 
emphasising his phrase to the point where it became a subtle 
insult — " is very sweet to the actor. It reconciles him to what 
he must take to be a breach of true art, the introduction of his 
own person on the scene where he has appeared as an im- 
personator of character. Some actors are expected to make 
speeches after their exertions should be over. I am one of 
those poor actors. In the name of myself, a poor actor, and 
the poor actors in my company, I must thank this distinguished 
body of ladies and gentlemen for the patience with which 
they have listened to Mr. O'Deigh's little trifle. It is, of 
course, merely a trifle, pour passer le temps. Next season, 
I hope, I may give you a really serious production. Mr. 
O'Deigh cables me that he is happy such distinguished per- 
sons in such a critical town have applauded his little effort. 
I am sure ever so many of you would rather be at home than 
listening to the apologies of a poor actor. For I feel I 
must apologise for presenting so inconsiderable a trifle. A 
mere summer night's amusement. I have played it as a sort 
of rest for myself, as preparation for larger productions. 
If I have amused you, I am pleased. The actor's province 
is to please. The poor actor thanks you." 

Now that is but very little enlarged and embroidered 
on the actual curtain speech made by Mansfield when 



CRITICISM 337 

Shaw's " The Devil's Disciple " was given in the old 
Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. 

The riddle, however, of this manysided genius was un- 
solved in " The Imitator," nor was it ever soluble. What 
heaven and what hell was in that various character no 
other human being might say. There was as much gen- 
tleness and kindness as there was bitterness and sarcasm, 
as much charity and good humor as there was peevish- 
ness. Much of his ill humor came, I am sure, from ill 
health, from physical discomforts. The smallest things 
disturbed his temper. I recall an instance of that which, 
since the point is against myself, may be of interest 
here. 

Employing my pen as I was, for Mansfield, it was not 
to be expected that I could escape the commission to 
write a play on Dean Swift. Every writing man who 
ever had speech with Mansfield, — from Charles Henry 
Meltzer to Clyde Fitch — must, I am sure, at one time or 
another, have been committed to that dreadful effort. 
Just as the most populous club in New York could be 
formed of ex-editors of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, so 
have some of us thought seriously of founding a club for 
those approached by Mansfield on the Dean Swift de- 
tail. It was the satire in Swift's character that fasci- 
nated the actor. To any experienced eye, it was, of 
course, as impossible to get drama out of that career as 
out of the Pentateuch. But I was too young to have 
that detail daunt me ; and none of the " Dean Swift 
Club "-members warned me. So I slaved and sweated, 
and appeared, presently, with a completed act. 

It was at the clubhouse of the American Yacht Club, 
then stationed at Milton Point, Rye. The dinner prom- 
ised beautifully, but — it was not to be. We had, alas, 
a stupid waiter! He was clumsy, and he was tactless. 
Before we were at the third course, Mansfield's temper 
was in shreds. I knew the storm signals : I knew I was 



338 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

doomed; but I went through with it. We settled our- 
selves into rocking-chairs. Mansfield smoked and looked 
gloomily at the Sound. Never, all the time that I read, 
did he cease glaring gloomily at the Sound. I unrolled 
the impossible drama of Swift and Stella. And when it 
was over, I waited. It seemed a long wait ; but finally 
Mansfield spoke — and actually smiled as he spoke. 
" Send it, my boy," he said, " to Harper's ! " 
And yet, who knows — if he had not quarreled with that 
waiter . . . 

I have tried to indicate that this great man of the 
theatre was one of the best hated men of his time, and 
most heartily hated by his own profession. But nothing 
that has ever been said or printed on that point is so 
horrid an indictment of that average actor whom I began 
this chapter by professing my aversion to, as was that 
last chapter in Richard Mansfield's career, his funeral. 

Mansfield died the morning of August 30th, 1907, in 
New London. He was buried the following Monday, in 
the private God's Acre which was part of that lovely 
estate he had become possessed of. New London is a 
matter of three hours from New York, and two from 
Boston. They were to make one again with nature that 
great player who for years had given employment to 
more people of the theatre than any single other actor 
in America. You would have thought, would you not, 
that, if no great press of players, at least a representa- 
tive handful of the best of them would have made it a 
point to be there? I, at least, — though we had quar- 
reled; we had thought none the less of each other — was 
glad to go to the last scene in which this great man 
was to figure on this side the grave. To have known 
him was an honor; if I might attend the funeral, it was 
I who was benefited; that was the way it seemed to me. 

It was a dismal day of rain. The train that took me 
east was not full of actors ; it was easy enough to see 



CRITICISM 339 

that. " Full of actors ! " Will you believe me if I tell 
you just how many actors were at Mansfield's funeral? 

Exactly one actor! 

Incredible, you say? But most damnably true. We 
who followed him were the friends he had made, in his 
private, social life in New London ; the immediate busi- 
ness entourage that had been his when he fell ill; one 
actor, and my poor self! 

Oh, yes ; they had done the cheap and easy things ; 
they had telephoned to the florist, and they had written 
messages, or even telegraphed them. But all that body 
of his fellows, those actors, some of whom he had kept 
in bread and meat, and all of whom he had outranked — 
where were they? Sitting smugly, somewhere, out of the 
wet, and cursing his memory. 

Never was there a more damning criticism of the mum- 
ming mind than that. The actors themselves more per- 
manently wrote themselves down, in that action, than 
have any of the writers who proved them vagabonds. If 
they owed Mansfield, the individual player, nothing, they 
owed to what he represented — to the genius of their art 
— every possible reverence they could show. It was not 
simply the man they buried there that day above the 
Thames and Long Island Sound; it was the art of act- 
ing's finest embodiment our time had known. 

No ; do not expect me to like these fellows, or the 
newspapers who, gathering subscriptions for their old 
age, deny an equal right to the more real art of let- 
ters. 

An irritable and jealous species, too, no doubt, the 
breed of writing-men ; but — not as utter graceless curs 
as those who stayed away from Mansfield's funeral. 

Chicago churches never appealed to me; but rarely 
have I seen a larger crew of reverent writing men than 
gathered in one of them when Eugene Field was buried. 

Between those two funerals — Richard Mansfield's and 



340 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Eugene Field's — I find all the argument I need confirm- 
ing me in my opinion of the average actor. 

These excursions into the domain of the theatre are 
not so irrelevant as they may have seemed. They ex- 
tend our view of the critical field, on which the Man of 
Letters and the homme de theatre so often meet. The 
same toadying element in American criticism which ele- 
vated the " best seller " at the expense of a Bierce, cur- 
ried favor with the average player and playgoer to the 
neglect of the playwright. The same newspaper which 
overflows with gossip about mummers prints no more crit- 
icism of letters than the publishers distribute in their 
" slips." What has brought the one art, in fact — if you 
are to call acting an art — to its present state of only 
commercial eminence, has brought the other still lower. 

The lack of critics is what has undone us. 

Whom — to repeat my question — shall we compare with 
Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, or George Moore? Name 
me an American in that rank! 

It is that trio which has specially interested me; let 
us consider them in turn. Each of these three Irishmen 
touched, in his time, the theatre as well as literature ; so 
that from our comparison between player and writer we 
come to these commanding critical figures easily enough. 

The greatest man of letters of the three, the man who 
best proclaimed " the critic as artist," was Oscar Wilde. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

Paradox is never so absolutely king as when you try 
to determine the separate ways of life and of literature. 
The poet lives his life, you say, and that is one matter; 
the poem lives its life, and that is quite another. Be- 
tween the writer and his writings the discriminating must 
observe divorce. . . . Then, directly contradicting, 
is the theory of the goodly who are touched with the 
Puritan taint. Every written line, these hold, is the 
intimate expression of self. The sinner cannot write 
other than sinful thing. Only the ploughman should 
write of the plough. . 

The farther you fare, if you would reach dogma on 
this point, the deeper will you mire. Paradox alone 
rules. 

And rules nowhere so supremely as in the case of 
Oscar Wilde. If, on the one hand, we plead that it is 
the man's literature, not his life, that posterity should 
cherish ; on the other, it is folly to forget how completely, 
in Wilde, the artist chose life as well as letters for ex- 
pressing his self. " Life itself is an art, and has its 
modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express 
it," wrote Wilde in his essay on Wainewright — marvel- 
lous in itself, and more so for the tragic thaumaturgy 
by which Time made of it a prophecy of Wilde's own 
fate ! — and Charles Whibley, later, echoed with " there is 
an art of life, as there are arts of colour, form and 
speech." 

If we incline to consider Wilde as the artist in life, if 
we recall his career as aesthete, as triumphant dandy, as 
successful playwright, we have also to remember the 
tragedy, the prison, the dismal, horrid crumbling to a 
sordid death. Inextricably mingled were his living and 
341 



342 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

his writing; to consider his prose, his plays, his poetry, 
only by the light of his prison and its aftermath, were 
as stupid as to imagine that one can ever read a page 
of his without finding there some echo of his personality. 
No man whose energy and delight in a personal prose, 
and whose paradoxic yet sincere infatuation with art 
could make such impress on the time and land he lived 
in, can be erased, by any act of his own, or by our voli- 
tion, from the world's chronicle. If his triumphs were 
gorgeous ; if he turned the fogs of London into rose- 
gardens for his fancy ; if in vanity and impertinence he 
ruled his world as a monarch, dictating taste and thought 
and language, he was to sound, later, the depths of de- 
spair and pain ; his soul, once so arrogant in its scorn 
of human emotion, was to suffer sorrow, and shame and 
contempt. The mood of the triumphant dandy we have 
in his earlier, that of the self-pitying sufferer in his 
later, writings. He was always, in life as in letters, the 
man of his mood, the " artist in attitudes." 

Macaulay, writing of Byron, said : " We know of no 
spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its 
periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, di- 
vorces, and family quarrels, pass with little notice. But 
once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. 
." After an almost literal account of what years 
afterwards took place about Wilde, Macaulay concluded 
that passage : " At length our anger is satiated. Our 
victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes 
quietly to sleep for seven years more." 

A month after Wilde's death I published an argument 
seeking to disestablish the connection between his noble 
artistic achievements and the cloud under which his name 
still lay. It was foolhardy, said the cautious, thus to 
fly in the face of respectability ; it was vain to prophesy 
that Time could ever restore this man's work in the gen- 
eral appreciation. 



CRITICISM 343 

To-day, not ten years later, it is amusing to recall 
that argument of mine, its reception, and its eventual 
vindication. 

Let me give you a notion of that argument, printed 
first in January, 1901 : 

" It shall be the first thing I do in the next world," 
he avowed once, so such of us as have proper faith in 
promises mortal or immortal, may conceive Oscar Wilde 
at work upon translating Flaubert's " Tentations " into 
English. For his career in this world is closed by the 
great Veto of Death, as once before the man had closed 
it by his own folly. 

No sane judgment can blink the conclusion that in 
both poetry and prose, in play, in story and in essay, 
Oscar Wilde proved himself one of the most brilliant of 
those using the English language in the last quarter of 
the nineteenth century. We have only to recall Poe, 
Byron, Shelley and Verlaine to remember that great tal- 
ent is not infrequently companion to grave faults. Some 
of his work may seem sicklied over with the taint of his 
baser self. " Salome," " The Picture of Dorian Gray " 
and " The Sphinx " suffer from being construed too much 
in the shadow of his personal scandal. What, on the 
other hand, could be more exquisite than " The Happy 
Prince and Other Tales," " The House of Pomegranates," 
the " Poems," or more witty than the critical essays in 
"Intentions"? To deny the power of this man's writ- 
ings, now when he is dust, and when his baser part may 
well have oblivion as its share, is to commit the folly of 
the British Museum when it withdrew the books it once, 
for their intrinsic merits, had housed; and to surpass in 
cowardice those managers who stopped the successful runs 
of Wilde's plays. 

Aside from the succession of tragedies that closed the 
public career of Oscar Wilde, the impress made by the 
man was certainly as much a part of the history of the 



344 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

manners of the nineteenth century in its decadence, as 
his writings were a part of its literature. Of all the many 
who displayed their personalities, and their talents, to 
the illumination and amusement of that century, he was 
the last whom it would be proper to consider only a name 
behind a pen. Gifted as he was, he had the additional 
shrewdness to see that the public must be fooled first and 
asked to appreciate afterwards ; he played the fool, there- 
fore, to the result that his fame, if a curious one, became 
international. His career as an esthete, as a leader of 
an entire artistic movement in England, is matter of 
history. His influence was both direct and indirect. Di- 
rectly, he did away with a deal of the hard woodenness 
then characterising the interiors of English houses ; indi- 
rectly, he gave the world Du Maurier's cartoons in 
Punch, and the famous Gilbert & Sullivan operetta of 
" Patience." Mr. Max Beerbohm has given us a charm- 
ing picture of the England of 1880, in which he bade us 
fancy Wilde trotting Beauty about through England ; 
that, indeed, was just what he did. Exaggeration at- 
tended him, of course ; fashions, if you spell them fads, 
invariably exhaust their foolish possibilities first. It was 
the same in the case of the black-and-white work of Au- 
brey Beardsley ; the morbid, uncanny qualities in his 
work made him offensive to the majority, yet the power 
and freshness of his talent were indisputable. He was a 
discovery of Wilde's ; it was to the older man's patronage 
that the younger owed the beginnings of his meteoric, 
brief career. 

One may conceive that in Wilde a perverse sense of 
loyalty to art kept him from ever displaying the real 
depths below his obvious insincerities ; he had begun by 
being a public fool ; he had succeeded in establishing that 
as a reputation for himself, and the rumor of his para- 
doxic brilliance was too secure and too amusing for him 
to risk shattering it with glimpses of a more serious self. 
Yet who can read his sonnet " Helas ! " appearing in the 



CRITICISM 345 

1881 edition of his " Poems," without feeling that under 
the glitter and the pose there was something else, some- 
thing the gay world of London knew nothing of? Pub- 
licly, Wilde posed as a Soul only in the spirit in which 
that word was then, in the 'Eighties, used in English so- 
ciety, as opposed to the Smart ; he pretended nothing 
about him was genuine ; he passed for a symbol of his 
own clever defense of liars ; yet in " Helas ! " the soul 
gave its cry. 

Wilde's position in English society, in letters and the 
theatre, was remarkable and enviable. The surface bril- 
liance of his first comedy, " Lady Windermere's Fan," was 
followed by " An Ideal Husband," " The Importance of 
Being Earnest " and others. England, America and Aus- 
tralia applauded these flashing dialogues, as they had 
smiled at his estheticism. Hardly any other figure had 
been as much a target for satire and caricature. His 
American lecture tour brought him the clamorous criti- 
cism he hoped for; his esthetic leadership, in its early 
stages, effected Bunthorne and Posthlewaite, and, some 
years afterwards, following his appearance before a thea- 
tre curtain with a cigarette in his fingers and a green 
carnation on his coat, led to the picture drawn in " The 
Green Carnation." Here, again, we may give him credit 
for serving as an artistic influence ; it was through " The 
Green Carnation " that Mr. Robert Hichens, until then 
active chiefly as a musical critic, first took to fiction. 

About such a man there has, naturally, accumulated a 
mass of anecdotic matter. Of one whom Edgar Saltus 
declared the best conversationist in England this was but 
natural. 

There was the story of the male kitten which Wilde, 
in friendly days, gave Whistler. The two fell out; time 
passed. One day Mrs. Whistler comes to her husband 
in amaze. " What do you think," she said, " Oscar has 
kittens." " Impossible ! " says the astonished artist. 



346 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

" Come and see ! " They view the litter together, and 
nothing is said for a moment or so. Then, at last, 
Whistler finds his solution. " Well," he declares, " they 
must be plagiarised." 

Immortal is that retort of Whistler's when Wilde had 
sighed, after a witticism of the other's, " Ah, how I wish 
I had said that ! " " Never mind," ran the retort, " you 
will!" 

Characteristic, too, was that about the tax-collector 
who, after much vain pursuit, finally came on Wilde issu- 
ing from his Tite Street house. Wilde refused payment, 
declaring that, if he owed any taxes, which he consid- 
ered improbable and absurd, he certainly did not owe them 
in that district, for he did not live there. " But this is 
your house," said the collector, " you occupy it ; I've 
just seen you coming out. You must live here." 

" Most positively I do not." 

" At any rate," retorted the now desperate man, " you 
do what legally constitutes living in the house. You 
sleep there. You won't deny that? " 

" But, my dear man," was the answer, with a languid 
stifling of a yawn, " you must consider: I sleep so 
badly!" 

And, finally, there is that pathetic story of Wilde's 
last illness. Being told that the only thing that might 
help him was an extremely expensive operation, he sighed : 

" Then I must die beyond my means." 

Whether these were authentic or not, their circulation 
proved his prominence. If a retort, or an anecdote, was 
witty enough to be exceptional, his period fathered it on 
Wilde. 

The culminating fascination in all that Wilde 
wrote, by virtue of his career's closing, was in his essay 
on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Never in all the world 
was a more uncanny bit of appreciation written. In 
every line of this essay on " Pen, Pencil and Poison " one 



CRITICISM 347 

reads, now that Wilde is no more, the phrases pointing 
to Wilde's own career. It is as if he had, years before 
the event, given us a document that should serve in sort 
as an apology. The parallel is close to the point of 
gruesomeness. There is no argument that an intending 
pleader for Wilde's writings could use that Wilde had not 
himself used, years before his own disgrace, for Waine- 
wright, the man who was artist, poet, dilettante, forger 
and poisoner. Wainewright, too, startled London as a 
dandy. . . . Can one read, without some emotion, 
Wilde's passage touching Wainewright? " The sentence 
now passed on him was, to a man of his culture, a form 
of death. . . . The permanence of personality is a 
very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the Eng- 
lish law solves the question in an extremely rough-and- 
ready manner. . . . His crimes seem to have had an 
important effect upon his art. They gave a strong per- 
sonality to his style. . . . The fact of a man being 
a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic 
virtues are not the true basis of art. . . . There is 
no essential incongruity between crime and culture." 

It is the poetry, the prose, the plays that remain with 
us ; the things he wrote, and the things his personality 
caused to be written ; all are voices of their special time ; 
all memorable items in the chronicle of two or three 
decades. Nothing of the black shadow that ousted him 
from the world, that made him as one dead even before 
death, should creep over his writings and his achieve- 
ments for art and culture. 

We read De Maupassant, and his scarlet sins and black 
butterflies no longer concern us ; a verse or so of Ver- 
laine's will outlive that of the most stainless curate who 
ever was horrified at thought of absinthe; D'Annunzio 
and Mendes sin quite as fluently, according to the puri- 
tans, as they write. Millions have lived righteously with- 
out leaving for posterity anything so fine as " The Bal- 
lad of Reading Gaol." One has only to read that splen- 



348 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

did poem, one of the very strongest written in English 
in the last twenty-five years, to realise what a hideous 
punishment followed the man's downfall. 

Each word he wrote of Wainewright had intenser ap- 
plication to himself. He might even have been happier 
if he, like Wainewright, had died in prison. Death found 
him with all his sins upon him, huddled, so to speak, with 
the memories and survivals of a splendid career, a ghastly 
disaster. No death in all history seems more horrid than 
this one. Beau Brummel in Calais, Verlaine in Paris, do 
not approach this, since poverty and loneliness do not 
combine to equal that other dreadful Fate that grinned 
beside the bedside of this once brilliant Irishman. One 
may fancy the beautiful cruel, yet pitiful wanton, Paris, 
whispering by that bed: 

" For none can tell to what red Hell 
His sightless soul may stray." 

The sunflowers, the lilies and the velvet are gone, yet 
the satire and the caricature they aroused remain part 
of our literature and our art. The tinsel of estheticism 
is dust, yet the period of its reign was as real as this 
to-day is, and we ourselves are heirs in gaining knowl- 
edge of the Japanese arts. The drawings of Du Maurier 
and Beardsley, the writings of Hichens, the words and 
music of Gilbert & Sullivan — and an entire school of 
German minstrels — testify obliquely to the power of the 
man whose Hell, more literally than that of any other 
man, was indeed paved with Intentions. 

Thus far I wrote in January, 1901. 

What was sketched in the heat of emotion, Time more 
than vindicated. A year later " The Importance of Be- 
ing Earnest " was again played in St. James's Theatre, 
London. Everywhere the calmer perspective of time led 
to increase rather than fading in regard for his writings. 



CRITICISM 349 

Australia and America saw his plays again. In 1903, 
out of half a dozen plays from the English presented in 
European continental centres, in Buda-Pesth, Munich and 
Paris, Wilde's play " Salome " was the bill in the ma- 
jority of cases. 

i 

As the years went on, no exotic influence upon the con- 
tinental literature of Europe, as it concerned itself with 
formal art, was more noticeable than that of Oscar Wilde. 
Strolling in the rare sunshine that visited Berlin in the 
spring of 1905, I was everywhere struck by that. Chance 
finally, I recall, took me into a quaint little bookshop 
facing what was once the workshop of Joseph Joachim. 
There I found a little book, giving, from French and 
German sources, intimate glimpses of Wilde's later years, 
after his issue from prison ; I translated it, and it was 
published under the title of " Recollections." In my In- 
troduction I pointed to the dominance of outside influ- 
ence on the German theatre; that farces from the French, 
dismal stuff from Scandinavia, and comedies by Barrie and 
Shaw were taking turn with Hauptmann, Sudermann, 
Max Halbe, Hartleben and Schnitzler. But the piece 
played oftenest on both sides of the Rhine was " Salome." 
And when you went beyond the theatre, to the windows 
of the bookshops, you saw " De Profundis " paraded as 
the book of the season, and a very deluge of literature 
about its author. What was newest in that I seized, and, 
as I said, translated. 

Certainly only once before had so strong an exotic in- 
fluence come on European letters, and that was when 
Baudelaire gave Poe to France. Aside from the spread 
of Wilde's writings themselves throughout Europe, I 
found much interest in the whole modernisation of Ger- 
man letters. The movement typified in England by the 
" Yellow Book," in America by the " Lark," the " Chap- 
book," and the other items in the so-called " pamphlet 
movement," had its German equivalent. Upon a number 



350 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of the younger German writers in prose and verse, for 
print and playhouse, the Irishman's influence seemed dis- 
coverable. The thought-mode of such men as Frank Wede- 
kind, Otto Bierbaum, Richard Dehmel, Ernst Von Wol- 
zogen and E. R. Weiss had its relationship to the art 
of Wilde. One need not say the impetus for that school 
came from the author of " Salome " and " Intentions," 
but at least it ran parallel with his. Indeed, we might 
easily go so far as to connect with him that extraordinary 
and interesting movement which some years ago at- 
tempted to give the German music-hall the dignity of 
actual art. That UeberbrettP movement, dissolving, 
evaporated into what was later the " cabaret made in 
Germany." But to that I must devote a special chap- 
ter. 

Our immediate concern is with the literature about 
Wilde which Europe offered on every hand in 1905. One 
of the most vivid pictures shown was that, by Andre 
Gide, of Wilde just before the closing of his public career. 
He met him in Biskra, in 1895, for the first time in three 
years, and the Frenchman's account of the subsequent 
interviews, whether authentic or not, were fascinating to 
a degree. 

Just as Pierre Loti once wrote of Pity and of Death, 
so might Wilde's " De Profundis " be called Wilde's book 
of Pity and of Life. As that book hinted the tragedy of 
prison life, especially the soul's tragedy, so did the little 
volume of " Recollections " present glimpses of his life 
after prison. The few had perforce to read " De Pro- 
fundis " in the light of knowledge that its author, after 
all the resolutions and conclusions of that document, re- 
verted to his baser self, and died with his life fallen far 
below the altitude marked in the prison letters. On some 
points the chapters by M. Gide and by Ernest La Jeu- 
nesse were in conflict ; as in the matter of the number 
following Wilde's body to the grave; but neither in the 
Ross " Life " nor in the so-called Complete Edition issued 



CRITICISM 351 

in 1907 have I found those details more accurately de- 
clared. 

A year later, in the spring of 1906, Wilde's European 
vogue was still spreading. In Berlin " An Ideal Hus- 
band " was on the boards of the Das Kleine Theater ; 
Vienna was issuing a Complete Edition in German ; Leon- 
ardo was pointing out, in Florence, Italian interest ; and 
in Madrid fascinating glimpses of " Salome's " author 
had been given by Gomez Carillo. Inasmuch as the play 
in question was first offered to London only in 1906 — ■ 
and if we believe Mr. Max Beerbohm, refused as too seri- 
ous ! — Carillo's glimpses retain their interest ; the more 
so since the Strauss opera has become the medium for 
so much notoriety. 

" In those days," Carillo wrote, " Wilde's thoughts were 
busied only with the lustful dance of Salome. ' You are from 
Madrid?' And, after a pause, 'If for no other reason, I 
have always longed to go to Spain that I might see in the 
Prado Titian's Salome, of which Tintoretto once exclaimed: 
' Here at last is a man who paints the very quivering flesh ! ' 
. . . No day went by without his talking to me of Salome. 
Now it was a passing woman who started him dreaming of 
the Hebraic princess; again he stood for hours before the 
jewelers' windows building for himself the ideal combina- 
tion of gems with which to festoon the body of his idol. One 
evening he asked me suddenly, in the middle of the street, 
' Don't you think she is better entirely naked ? ' He was' 
thinking of Salome. ' Yes,' he went on, ' absolutely naked. 
But strewn with jewels, all ringing and tinkling in her hair, 
on her ankles, her wrists, her throat, enclosing her hips and 
heightening with their myriad glittering reflections the un- 
chastity of that unchaste amber flesh. For of an unknowing 
Salome, who is a mere tool, I refuse to hear a word; no, 
no, Salome knows. . . .' Another time his Salome was 
all chastity. I recall an evening when Wilde came from the 
Louvre, and began to speak to me of a gentle princess who 
danced before Herod as if by a call from Heaven, that she 



352 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

might finally be able to demand punishment on the lying 
enemy of Jehovah. ' Her quivering body/ he said, ' is tall 
and pale as a lily, nothing sexual is in her beauty. Veils 
woven by angels conceal her slenderness, her blond hair flows 
like molten gold over her shoulders. . . .' Once we were 
at Jean Lorrain's. Before a picture of the beheaded woman, 
a very pale head, Wilde exclaimed, ' Why, that is Salome ! ' 
And at once he imagined a princess who brings her lover the 
head of John, and then immediately sends her own head also, 
because she fancies herself despised by the young man. ' It 
is exactly like that,' he whispered. ' A Nubian gospel dis- 
covered by Boissiere tells of a young philosopher, to whom a 
Jewish princess makes a present of an apostle's head. The 
youth says to her smilingly, ' What I had rather have is 
your own head, sweetheart.' On that she goes away, pale, 
and that evening a slave brings the young philosopher on 
a golden plate the poor little head of his sweetheart. The 
scholar says, ' Why all this blood ? ' and goes on reading 
Plato. ' Don't you think that is Salome ? ' 

' Write that ! ' said someone. Wilde actually began a story 
with the title, ' The Double Beheading.' He soon tore the 
sheets up, and thought of a poem. That, too, he relinquished, 
and chose drama. . . . Only Gustave Moreau's portrait 
unveiled for him the soul of his dreams. Many a time he 
simply repeated Huysman's words, ' She is nearly naked. 
In the whirl of the dance the veils are unloosed, the shawls 
are fallen to the ground, and only jewels clothe her body. 
The tiniest of girdles spans her hips; between her breasts a 
jewel glitters like a star. . . .' Five years later, in 
prison, in hours of sleeplessness, of fever and hunger, he 
mechanically repeated to himself the words : ' Between her 
breasts a jewel glitters like a star.'" 

Recalling Wilde's preoccupation with his " Salome," 
and the painted versions of her, I have always wondered 
what he would have said to one exposed by the Seces- 
sionists in Berlin the summer of 1905. In the main that 
was a horrid lot of woolwork one found there, in rooms 
which in their time had shown the best of Manet, Monet, 
and Rodin. Only two men succeeded in counteracting 
the dreadful purples and greens prevailing; these were 



CRITICISM 353 

Franz Stuck, the veteran, and Gustav Klimt, who, to the 
foreign observer at least, was new. 

Here was the " Sphinx " again ; with her hard cruel 
breasts, cold lowering face, promising voluptuousness, 
and ensuring destruction ; a modern masterpiece in fleshly 
allegory. Beside it was a new Stuck canvas, a " Fight 
for the Female." Two crouching combatants, hairy, 
barbaric males ; their eyes glittered brutally ; their naked 
hands curled as claws ; the very hair of their beards and 
naked bodies bristling with rage and lust. Beside them, 
disdainful, at once the prize and the princess, stood the 
woman, tawny, sombre, cruel, the same woman of his 
" Sphinx," repelling yet attractive, like a dark, alluring 
vice. One was reminded of Felicien Rops ; for the ex- 
quisitely sharpened wit of the Belgian, we had here the 
hard animality of the Teuton. Wilde, I think, would 
have found that painting interesting. Still more, would 
he have lingered before the work of Gustav Klimt. 

A new man, this, by international standards. A curi- 
ous craft, his. His heights, his depths, displayed in one 
full room. Women, nothing but women. His method, 
if you must have comparison, compound of Mucha and 
of Botticelli. You recall the golden panels which Alphonse 
Mucha wasted on the world's walls some years ago in 
advertisement of Bernhardt's play " Gismonda " ? In 
much that fashion were wrought the best of those deco- 
rative canvases ; there was much gold and mosaic color 
in the background, much tenuous vapor in the figures 
themselves. A transparency and vagueness as if a girl 
by Rossetti were seen through the translucent glass of 
a bowl by Alexander. Slim gilt souls shining through 
slim gilt bodies. In one canvas at least a definite dream 
showed clearly; this showed Judith. The triumphant 
Jewess, brilliantly vivified, with lids half shut, the upper 
lip lifted to disdain and to triumph, had in her hand the 
head of Holofernes. Through his vapors, his gilt, his 
decorative mosaic, his flowing lines of supple limbs, the 
artist, in that one canvas, evoked a real soul. 



354 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

You could not see it without wondering what Wilde 
would have said of it. 

Speculation aside, there is still much, of actual his- 
toric and literary interest, to be told of " Salome." 

Especially the episode of the Salomania regnant in 
New York in January, 1907. 

That episode overflowed with immediate and compara- 
tive interest. When the second edition of my translated 
" Recollections " was issued at the close of 1906, it was 
made the target for much criticism directed against the 
inadvisability of further stirring unsavory embers. Fore- 
most in this was the New York Sun. Lest you imagine 
that the case presently to be cited is exceptional, let me 
remind you of the criticism that journal vented on Grover 
Cleveland in his lifetime, and of the appreciations printed 
after his death, to say nothing of the list of subscribers 
to a Cleveland Memorial including the name of W. M. 
Laffan. If newspaper reading memories; were not so 
short, how much more laughter there would be in our 
world! Moreover, if superstition did not die so hard in 
the majority, how little the legend of this or that jour- 
nal's surpassing wit would stand examination ! Wit that 
is careless of truth has always been one of the easiest 
things in the world. 

Here is what the Sun said on December 29, 1906, 
about those translated " Recollections " : 

Mr. Pollard himself is ciation of Oscar Wilde, 

flamboyant in his delight . . . Mr. Pollard might 

that Wilde is popular in have added that the curiosity 

Germany and that he influ- is as intense in America as 

ences a neurasthenic school in Europe, that his plays and 

of young writers. books are constantly before 

On the same date the the public, and that the man 

Boston Transcript said: himself is more frequently 

Mr. Pollard naturally calls discussed in print and in 

attention to the growing conversation than any other 

world-wide vogue and appre- writer of his epoch. 



CRITICISM 355 

You will note, if you do no more than read that Bos- 
ton comment, that I had been reserved rather than " flam- 
boyant." I knew some of those merry men of Park Row ; 
never since the Criterion Independent Theatre had they 
missed an opportunity ; and they never needed facts in 
their business of manufacturing opinion. Knowing this, 
I had been specially careful to recite only facts in my 
account of Wilde's European vogue. Several years in 
succession I had reported the spread of that vogue. Just 
a year before the " Salome " episode at the Metropolitan 
Opera House, I had stated that the one poignant note 
of European art that season had been the dancing, the 
dance of the Seven Veils in " Salome," of the courtesans 
in " Aphrodite," of the pseudo-Spaniards and Gauls in 
the Maxixe, of sleep-dancers like Mile. Madeleine, and 
interpreters of historic legends like Isadora Duncan. 

Small wonder, then, that when New York went tem- 
porarily mad on "Salome" in 1907, it made me smile; 
and when the wave of dancing overflowed us a year later, 
I should again experience the irony of being beforehand! 

In December, 1905, Richard Strauss's opera, using the 
Wilde drama as libretto, was given in Dresden; thence it 
spread about the continent. December, 1906', found it 
being prepared for the American public by way of the 
musical headquarters, the Metropolitan Opera House, an 
enterprise in which were paramount some of the same 
millionaires who control a section of the metropolitan 
press. The moment " Salome " became part of the para- 
mount operatic enterprise, the printed publicity accorded 
the story of this music-drama surpassed anything ever 
attempted by those who, in times when it was the mark 
of dangerous eccentricity rather than of being in the 
fashion, had insisted on the worth of Wilde's work. One 
evening paper printed " Salome " complete in an issue ; 
and for ten days it was impossible to pick up a news- 
paper that did not devote anticipatory eulogy to the 
Irishman's macabre version of a gospel legend. 



356 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

It was nothing less than Salomania. Those whose faith 
had nothing to do with the curiosity-stimulating impetus 
of a popular vogue, deplored the extent to which the 
newspapers were overdoing things. Such heights of en- 
thusiasm as the New York newspapers reached both be- 
fore and after the performance of the Strauss version 
had not been reached elsewhere. Note this, from the 
columns of the same paper which had sneered, within the 
month, at another's " flamboyant delight " : 

If to-day the genius of Oscar Wilde, many years dead but 
not transfigured, can so touch with the vital spark of dra 
matic power the master musician of the world in our time, 
let the frogs croak as they will . . . these slings can 
harm none but the mud-throwers themselves. What man's 
" Salome " does the public want, if not Wilde's creature of 
the " vile, virginal face " who may — indeed, who must — have 
been such a beast as did actually in history demand the head 
of John the Baptist on a charger? . . . And who but 
Wilde, and not Sudermann nor all their predecessors in Hero- 
dian lore, has put into Herod's mouth at the crucial scene that 
stage whisper: " Sie ist ein Ungeheuer, Deine Tochter; ich 
sage Dir, sie ist ein Ungeheuer ! " 

The date of that was January 23, the morning after 
the only public performance. 

If you have any logic in you, was not that critical 
somersault enough to shatter all pretensions for fairness 
and justice that newspaper may ever have had? Note 
too, — as a result of that passionate eagerness to please 
the proprietors of the opera house and the newspapers — 
that airy closing sentence, whereby Wilde is made author 
of the German translation, instead of the line : " She is 
monstrous, thy daughter; I tell thee, she is monstrous." 

Against such splendor of encomium as the journalistic 
turncoats gave us that morning, the stoutest adherents 
of Wilde might not hope to compete. Yet, merely to 
maintain this history intact, here is an impression of that 



CRITICISM 357 

performance as it struck one who for years had been 
signaling the European progress of this man's renown. 

The Strauss music seemed magically the complement 
of the Wilde words, even in their German tones. Al- 
ways in music, as in poetry, I have believed in sheer mel- 
ody. A cave-dwelling viewpoint, perhaps, but — my own. 
For me it was the lyric always, whether Heine's, Car- 
man's, or Bierbaum's, or Victor Daley's ; poetry, in my 
philosophy, was for chronicle, or legend, or epic, an out- 
moded medium. In music, to the same extreme ; the 
music-dramas of Wagner had always struck me quite as 
absurd as the arias in " Lucia " or " Rigoletto." In the 
" Imitator " there was written, " Music must be heard 
and not seen . . . the opera is at best a contradic- 
tion in terms. ... It should be seen as little as 
any other form of music. The audience, supplied with 
the story of dramatic action, should follow the incidents 
by ear, not by eye." Yet Strauss's " Salome " almost 
persuaded me; as in another town, on another day, 
" Louise " did, and " Aphrodite " and " Le Chemineau." 
For there, indeed, to use that phrase again, we could 
follow the incidents by ear; the veriest tyro in music, 
so only he was sensitive in the fullest meaning of that 
word, could see the close relation between the orchestra- 
tion and the action. 

All the degeneracy of Jerusalem under the tetrarch, all 
the insistence on coming horror that fills the opening of 
Wilde's play, the mournful iteration of such thoughts 
as " Never have I seen her so pale ! " and " Something 
terrible may happen," are all wrought in upon the ear 
by that music, as abominable and amazing as the story 
itself. Strauss bewildered by discords that he might 
enchant with beauty; he symbolised coming tragedy, 
regnant horror, the lust of the eye, perverted passion, 
and all the sensations which the Irishman framed in 
words. Whoever saw the Herod of Burrian, with his 



358 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

gesticulating hands and his consuming desire, will hardly 
forget it; the singer may live by that performance. As 
for Salome, prototype of all her race's and her sex's 
oblique passions, Fremstad's version of her was perhaps 
a shade too luscious ; so vivid was her vitality, so com- 
pelling her physical appeal, that the line " Niemals habe 
ich sie so blass gesehen ! " fell somewhat impertinent ; 
the pallor and the horror of the Beardsley Salome were 
missing, though all else was there. 

(Not until the Spring of 1908, in the Costanzi 
Theatre, in Rome, did I see the absolute Salome, in 
Gemma Bellincioni. Her youthful sinuousness, her pallid 
beauty held the eye, as did her voice the ear. Her scene 
with the head of John surpassed in ghastly fascination 
even that bad quarter of an hour which Fremstad gave 
the Metropolitan Opera House. Against that scene the 
churchly pope issued his ban; just as the plutocratic 
pope had done, the year before, in New York. . . . 
But we go too fast. . . .) 

The New World admitted, after that performance, 
Strauss's title as a king of tone, Wilde's vindication as 
artist. Six years dead, and crowned genius by his bit- 
terest revilers. 

James Huneker turned to me, as that curtain fell, 
and said two words : " Poor Wilde ! " 

But the episode was by no means over. While still 
the echoes of that performance were ringing through 
press and public, and even such plays as Sudermann's 
" John the Baptist " caught some of the general fury to 
see the girl who danced before the king, the puritans and 
the plutocrats were already massing for an attack. On 
January 26th, Heinrich Conried, the manager who, un- 
der arrangement with Richard Strauss and with co-opera- 
tion of Herr Hertz as conductor, with the singers and 
the orchestra of over a hundred, was responsible for 
that " Salome " performance, received from the owners 



CRITICISM 359 

of the opera house a formal protest against its repeti- 
tion. 

Rumor placed the impetus for that protest in the 
maidenly squeamishness of a certain daughter of a mil- 
lionaire. If we believe that, this was indeed the crown- 
ing proof that all art in America is under dominance of 
the Matinee Girl. For that young person a niche should 
be reserved beside Anthony Comstock, Mrs. Ormiston 
Chant, and Carrie Nation. In the gallery of specimens 
showing " The Poor Taste of the Rich " she should have 
prominent space. But perhaps rumor lied; let us return 
to the record. 

The directors present when further performance of 
" Salome " was banned included these : 

Pierpont Morgan, W. K. Vanderbilt, August Belmont, 
H. McK. Twombly, Geo. G. Haven, A. D. Juillard, Geo. 
F. Baker, D. O. Mills, Geo. F. Bowdoin and Charles 
Lanier. 

To the action taken by these gentlemen a fame will 
attach such as none of their millions are likely to obtain 
for them. For fame has many varieties. 

If opinion and emotion be altogether shelved, cold 
reason must still wonder why, if interference was to take 
place, it did not occur before instead of after the per- 
formance. The play was ten years old and had been 
shown in every capital in Europe ; the music was a year 
old, and might have been heard in half a dozen other 
places in that period; the preparations for the New 
York performance had been months in the making. 
Never, in those months, did these lictors of our morals 
make a protest. Several of them were persons who had 
maintained a notorious activity in accumulating such 
art-objects, the world over, as the taste of others and 
their own money could procure; their banding together 
to forbid, for that time being, the public's enjoyment 
of this or that art-object, was absurd in the extreme. 
With difficulty, indeed, is language on this episode kept 



360 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

within reasonable limits ; nothing that ever happened in 
the art history of America made it so plain that what 
with the plutocrats on the one hand and the proletariat 
on the other we are between the devil and the deep sea. 

Only for the time being, however, was the Strauss- 
Wilde " Salome " deprived of American appreciation. 
Within two years after that episode of January, 1907, it 
was revived under other auspices, the name-part played 
by Mary Garden. 

Meanwhile, on the heels of that closure, there was a 
period of exploitation of the factitious vogue the news- 
papers had aroused. Persons wrote to the newspapers 
declaring Salome no lady; we suspect them to have been 
the same persons who for years had been raving lyrically 
about the pleasant little stories of incest which informed 
those Wagner operas to which the owners of the Metro- 
politan Opera House had never objected. Every music- 
hall had its " Salome " dance ; only the pianola and the 
phonograph and the kinetoscope remained as farther in- 
fernos. 

They tell us Wilde's " Salome " is not that of the 
gospels. True; but when we have seen and read all the 
versions of the legend; when we know how much quaint 
story is behind all that gospel for which we arrogate cap- 
ital letters ; we come to believe that Wilde, in his search 
for the curious and the sensual, came nearer the truth 
than any other artist. Laforgue builded a Salome ; 
Massenet gave us the music of " Herodiade " ; and Suder- 
mann wrote his " Baptist " play. Despite Miss Julia 
Marlowe's art, the artificiality of the German drama be- 
came evident ; that hoyden, with her flashes of childish- 
ness, of infantile cruelty and of horror at what she had 
done, — was only ridiculous. Sudermann succeeded only 
in one thing: he proved Wilde right. 

Before we come to that consideration of him as essay- 



CRITICISM 361 

ist and critic which brings him so prominently into this 
whole argument of mine, and most surely, I think, 
stamped him as the Man of Letters — as the critic of a 
sort America has lacked — let us look into the first so- 
called " Life " and the ditto " Complete Edition " pub- 
lished since Wilde's death. The former was published in 
1906; the latter, — though in Vienna a German transla- 
tion had appeared earlier — in 1907. 

The first " Life " was written by Robert H. Sherard, a 
journalist of Paris, who for some 16 years had known 
Wilde. In his one volume he included all the errors of 
taste and attitude that were possible. If in point of 
time the book was first, in appreciation of his subject's 
real importance, the Sherard " Life " will rank behind all 
the others. For there will, of course, be many others. 

In any effort to weld the double activities of this 
dandy, this poet, this essayist and this playwright, there 
lurked great danger. Save for a writer most fortunately 
equipped with tact upon the details of Wilde's life, the 
task insured calamity. Mr. Sherard exhausted, for the 
time being, all calamitous opportunity. From the very 
beginning we perceived that Mr. Sherard was of those 
who believe, with Sadakichi Hartmann, that Wilde's 
" morbid vagrom life will still fascinate us when his books 
are forgotten." In the case of Mr. Sherard we must re- 
gret the error in judgment, and the mistaken premises 
on which he posed the book. Not in all his 400 pages 
was there anything as pungent as some passages in Max 
Beerbohm's essay in " 1880." The biographer, with a 
sort of genius, misused most of the really vital details in 
the public career of this picturesque mummer who tried, 
in the closing of the Victorian era, to tiptoe languidly 
in the footsteps of Brummel and Disraeli. He saw but 
one color in the Wilde nimbus, and that was the color of 
catastrophe. 

In his very Preface Mr. Sherard pointed out that what 
was impossible three years before, namely, the writing 



362 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of such a " Life," was finally, in 1906, possible. Which, 
where it was not nonsense, meant only that a Life of 
Wilde must be nothing but a history of his private and 
public disgrace. It may not have been profitable in Eng- 
land, in those years, to remind the public of an unsavory 
scandal; but for a wholesomely written volume on the 
man's literature and such of his life as had reasonable 
bearing on his literature there had been plenty of room 
and safety. The reason this biographer did not think 
the coast clear was that he was obsessed with the im- 
portance, not of Wilde the writer, but of what the news- 
papers termed " the Wilde affair." 

Under the cloud of that obsession he wrote his " Life." 
Even in the family chronicles, the childhood years, etc., 
we were constantly prepared for the tragedy that was 
to come. Of the father, Sir Wm. Wilde, we had made 
most vivid for us his unbridled passions, his extraordi- 
nary bestiality and his wonderful mind ; we could not 
even look in on a " salon " with Speranza, Lady Wilde, 
as presiding genius, without hearing the biographer's 
theories on heredity and crime. He was unable to give 
the history of those early years with only the litterateur 
and the dandy in view ; he saw them all merely as prologue 
to a crime against society. 

On one detail the " Life " deserved credit : for showing 
the poverty against which Wilde long struggled. We 
learned that in London society he never really reached 
that supremacy that others fancied to be his ; that his 
position, such as it was, was only with the artists and 
literati of the town. He was never really popular; his 
attempt to pose as social and esthetic arbiter brought 
him to just such hazardous eminence as Beau Brummel's, 
whom the whole town joined in forgetting the moment a 
royal fiat went against him. 

Mostly, it was the biographer's obsession that haunted 
us. Time and again he reminds us that disease was at 
the root of this man's tragedy; that he was subject to 



CRITICISM 363 

attacks of an epileptic form. Psychopathia, megalomania, 
epilepsy — with these and other formidable syllables we 
are peppered. Nor, allowing for the biographer's un- 
happy bias, was it well reasoned out. If that was the 
crux of the man's career, as this historian asked us to 
believe, we naturally expected completeness and accuracy 
on it ; both were notably absent. The account of the two 
trials at the Old Bailey are absurdly inadequate ; any 
newspaper file will give you the whole tragic first act 
more succinctly. What the " fatal slip " was which Wilde 
made to Edward Carson, we are not told ; nor is anything 
hinted of the extraordinary panic in high places which 
spread through London the moment the verdict against 
Wilde was known. Our biographer is all for theory, and 
facts do not appeal to him. One of his most typical 
moments, as theorist and apologist, is when he describes 
Wilde's appearance on the first-night of " Lady Winder- 
mere's Fan," a cigarette in his mouth, and something akin 
to insult in his curtain-speech. 

I always wonder if Mr. Richard Mansfield ever smiled 
at this amazing paragraph of Sherard's: 

The man was under the shock of a great joy. He had 
temporarily lost his head. He did not know what he was 
doing. . . . He was a bulky, full-blooded man ; the blood 
rushed to his head, and he was unconscious of what he was 
doing. As to the cigarette, well, it was half-smoked. It had 
not been lighted for the purpose of the entry. He was such 
a habitual smoker that probably he did not even know that 
he had a cigarette in his hand. . . . 

Was ever a more impudent explanation made by a 
dullard for a brilliant? The astounding impertinence of 
a man who could think like that, attempting an analysis, 
in physical terms, of the motives behind this man's con- 
duct — this man who had written " The Decay of Lying." 

Among the salient omissions of fact in this " Life " 
are these: Wilde's interest in Aubrey Beardsley; his as- 



364 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

sociation with the " Yellow Book," or with Leonard 
Smithers the publisher; and Lord Alfred Douglas's ar- 
ticles in the "Revue Blanche." The names of Wilde's 
two sons are not given. We were told nothing as to 
when or how the various plays were written. 

The most valuable pages in this " Life " were those 
not Sherard's own. Henri De Regnier's was the opinion 
that Wilde was wont " to tell his stories like Villiers de 
l'Isle Adam told them," and scattered his jewels of wit 
as once did Buckingham ; and it was Walter Pater who 
declared that " there is always something of an excel- 
lent talker about the writings of Oscar Wilde " ; while 
many a phrase of Arthur Symons's rings longer in the 
memory than anything in this biography. There was 
no effort, though the book was written in 1906, to show, 
by exact dates, how, first in this country and in that, the 
reaction set in in Wilde's favor, and all the writings, the 
books and the plays came into their own again. 

The most one could say of that " Life of Oscar Wilde " 
was that it was first in the field. 

Similarly, the most one could say of the first Com- 
plete Edition of the " Writings of Oscar Wilde " pub- 
lished in America, was that it included everything. But 
it took an expert in Chinese puzzles to disentangle the 
apocryphal from the authentic, and to put arrangement 
into all that haphazard mass in 15 volumes. 

Aside from the apocryphal matter, there was one vol- 
ume by Wilde's mother. The plays were given com- 
pletely, and that was matter for gratitude. As to when 
these were first performed, and by whom, we were told 
nothing. In fact, there was no arrangement; no or- 
derly presentment. From the volume containing " In- 
tentions " the essay called " The Truth of Masks " was 
omitted, and inserted in a volume labeled " Poems in 
Prose." An Introduction by Richard Le Gallienne ap- 



CRITICISM 365 

peared in the volume of " Poems." Even here we found 
but slight note of individual opinion. The volume called 
" His Life : With a Critical Estimate of his Writings " 
was simply and admittedly a compilation from news- 
papers and familiar documents of that sort. The episode 
which so obsessed Sherard's " Life " is here slighted ; 
which is quite as well, if definite accuracy was not to be 
attempted at all. 

Nowhere was there coherence or logical arrangement. 
Bits of biography were sandwiched between poems and 
prose, and casual critical fragments appeared anywhere. 
A volume called " Epigrams " was entirely superfluous, 
since it merely repeated sentences and paragraphs to be 
found in proper context elsewhere in the edition. 

The only volume, aside from the plays, which had the 
least novelty for the average amateur of Wilde, was 
called " Essays, Reviews and Criticisms," in which was 
jumbled, higgledy-piggledy, what Wilde is supposed to 
have written while editor of the Woman's World; 
though nothing in this " edition " so specifies. Without 
date or other clue, all these pages are simply set before 
you, for you to make the best of. If you find true metal, 
you are still irritated by not knowing the date of it. 
Even so, there are lines that sound the value of this 
man's criticisms. Of an early volume by W. B. Yeats, 
we find Wilde writing : " It is impossible to doubt, after 
reading his present volume, that he will some day give 
us work of high import." There were memorable phrases 
in his comment on W. E. Henley, whom he dowered with 
" not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a brilliant, 
fantastic wit, but a real passion also for what is hor- 
rible, ugly or grotesque." 

(It is curious, in this connection, to recall that from 
prison and hospital we have, in our time, had three won- 
derful bits of artistry : Wilde's " Ballad of Reading 



366 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Gaol " ; the verses of Verlaine ; and the " In Hospital " 
pages by W. E. Henley.) 

Only Wilde himself could properly have phrased an 
opinion of the first American " Complete Edition " of his 
writings. It was well that he died before he saw it. 

The most salient utterances of Wilde the man of let- 
ters, the critic, are to be found in his essays. Paradox 
and mood were always paramount in his written expres- 
sions of himself; never more so than in the volume we 
know as " Intentions." Here the wisdom under his para- 
dox was most discoverable. Here, whether mindful or 
not of his actual life, one most clearly discerned his 
characteristic attitudes. Here were the most precious ut- 
terances of this amateur in art and life; here the most 
definite proofs that he was indeed, in his own words, 
" the critic as artist," — and therein represented the tri- 
umph of a type unknown in America. Jewels of wit 
and paradox were scattered so profusely in those pages, 
that if once we started to pick them up, only sheer weari- 
ness would give us pause. Truly we could declare, as 
William Watson did of Lowell, that the brilliance " is 
so great and so ubiquitous that it pays the not incon- 
siderable penalty of diverting our attention from the 
real soundness that underlies it all. So dazzling is the 
flash, and at times so sharp the report, that we scarcely 
notice the straightness of the aim." 

In that portion of the bookish world fashioning its 
verdicts on academic formula, the existence of any es- 
sayists save Lamb, Montaigne, and Stevenson is slurred. 
Yet of essayists who did memorable things critically, in 
our time, there were at least this Irish trio (for whom we 
may later seek even the dimmest of possible American 
counterparts) : Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and George 
Moore. All said trenchant things memorably. Often 
impertinent, yet never negligible. 



CRITICISM 367 

" Intentions " was magnificent with impertinence, but 
also with truth. As a book, it had splendidly the sin- 
cerity of Wilde's insincerity. It constantly made ridicu- 
lous the petty formulas of petty dogmatists. Observe 
Richard Burton — not of the Arabian Nights, but 
of New England — declaring that "in the essay an au- 
thor stands self-revealed; he may mask behind some 
other forms, in some measure; but commonplaceness, vul- 
garity, thinness of nature, are in this kind instantly un- 
covered. The essay is for this reason a severe test." 
All that assertion about the mask and what it hides is 
disproven in the very first of these Wilde essays, the 
one entitled " The Decay of Lying " — there he declares 
that what is interesting about people " is the mask that 
each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the 
mask." How, before the nimbleness of this creature of 
masks and moods, can we refrain from grinning at the 
stolid solemnity of the dogmatists and the dealers in 
sententiousness ? 

Literature is the advertisement of one's attitude to- 
ward life. It is the record of a mood. It is the im- 
press, writ in wax, of some mask we wore at some mo- 
ment. It is a quantity of conflicting things. It is revela- 
tion, and it is masquerade. It has as many facets as life 
itself; it is at once chameleon and sphinx. 

Whatever literature may be, the essays in " Inten- 
tions " were part and parcel of it ; irritating, insincere, 
paradoxic, but — indubitably literature. Epigram jostled 
contradiction ; truth elbowed the fantastic ; paradox 
played through every interval; they remained arrestingly 
entertaining, eminently readable. The style was brilliant, 
inconsequent, mannered, the essence of the man himself. 
This style was indeed the man ; you can, if you will, read 
him in every line of it. Here were all the triumphant 
moods of his triumphant years, expressed in glittering 



368 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

epigram and luminous diction; just as in the style of 
" The Ballad of Reading Gaol," we mark the prison bars, 
and in that of " De Profundus," we hear a cry of a soul 
desperately attempting to achieve sincerity through a 
chastened body. Always, above all, the style " of an 
excellent talker." 

Every one of the essays marked a happy pose. Here 
was Wilde in his gayest moods. The essay on " Pen, 
Pencil and Poison," with its uncanny forecast of his own 
plight, has already been referred to. It was in the essay 
on " The Critic as Artist " that we have that wonderful 
array of arguments ennobling the whole art of criticism. 
In " The Decay of Lying " also there was much lucid 
and yet elusive interpretation of the function of criticism. 
Never, in all these pages, is the reader safe in assuming 
that the brilliant manner had no wise matter behind it. 
Mannered matter, true, from a mannered man; but un- 
der the panoply of paradox, where commonplace could 
not enter, the truth was often hidden. Let me instance 
the much discussed theory about art imitating life. We 
need not pretend that it was new with Wilde, but he most 
adroitly set it forth, so that it was as vehemently dis- 
puted as if it had indeed been unheard of in Eckermann's 
Conversations and elsewhere. 

Wilde's whim, you will find, insisted on the imitations 
that life gave of artistic inventions. He told of English 
feminine beauty actually taking on the lines and hues 
first created by certain painters ; he told of a woman 
who acted exactly upon the Becky Sharp model; he gave 
instance on instance. Since then, history has conspired to 
uphold his theory. Sir Walter Besant, in " The Doubts of 
Dives " gave us a trenchant example. The late Julian 
Ralph gravely recounted the incident of a New York art 
school model who suddenly, unconscious of Du Maurier's 
heroine, refused to pose for the altogether. In the early 
years of the present decade a dancer appeared on the 
European continent, Mile. Madeleine, who pretended that 



CRITICISM 369 

she could only perform while in a trance, a la Trilby. 
Finally, do you recall the incident of Wilde's curtain 
speech, cigarette in hand, a green carnation in his coat? 
In the spring of 1905, nearly ten years later, in other 
words, a florist of Los Angeles, in California, produced 
from the soil a green carnation. 

After that, and much like it, can we quite laugh down 
such a sentence as this, from " The Decay of Lying " : 
" A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy 
it, to reproduce it in popular form, like an enterprising 
publisher " ? 

Throughout these essays there was the effort to build 
up a high estimate the world should give to criticism. 
Always the plea is for the critic whose art is also creative. 
He declared that " the only portraits in which one be- 
lieves are portraits where there is very little of the sitter 
and a great deal of the artist," and we need only think 
of Whistler and Sargent to realise the germ of truth in 
that. It was in " The Critic as Artist " that we have 
Wilde at his best, as brilliant essayist, keen critical ana- 
lyst, and as our greatest voice, with Walter Pater, in 
proclaiming the heights to which the critic can and 
should strive. In that essay were all those many mem- 
orable and witty phrases about his contemporaries, which 
rank with certain other impudent and amusing passages 
in George Moore's " Confessions of a Young Man." Mr. 
Henry James, we were told, " writes fiction as if it were 
a painful duty " ; Mr. Hall Caine writes " at the top of 
his voice," and of Meredith he penned the immortal 
phrase that " his style is chaos illumined by lightning." 
He deplored the novel with a purpose, despised Zola, ad- 
mired Balzac ; and summed up his theory of literature by 
declaring that it meant " distinction, charm, beauty and 
imaginative power." 

The function of criticism in its relation to art and 
life has never been better expressed than in Oscar Wilde's 
essay on " The Critic as Artist." 



370 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Steeped as he was in classic lore and legend, deeply 
as he had in his learning and travels, entered into Greek 
life and thought, Wilde's attitude in criticism was always 
a personal one, the record of brilliant personal impres- 
sionisms. Whom have the protagonists of the academic 
formula, and the impersonal standard, to bring into the 
scale of art against Wilde? 

No historian, Mr. Charles Whibley or another, has 
yet properly chronicled Oscar Wilde in his esthetic period. 
The early meed of notoriety which came to his person 
and his art was all in the interest of dandyism. Where 
others had chosen severe simplicity, he reverted to the 
Oriental, as D'Orsay, D'Aurevilly and others had done. 
No man who, aside from his own writings, has con- 
tributed to art and letters the Du Maurier sketches and 
the satire of Gilbert & Sullivan, can be omitted in a his- 
tory of dandyism. The pose, the insincerity of Wilde, 
were no more marked than in the other dandies. Brum- 
mel invented a cravat ; Wilde revived the glories of pea- 
cock feathers, of velveteen and sunflowers. Like Scrope 
Davies, the beau whom Brummel outshone, Wilde died in 
poverty in Paris. Like Beau Nash, he made elegance 
his income. The boredom, the weariness and the vanity 
of the true dandy were all his. In his efforts to make 
propaganda for Beauty, he deviated from true dandyism ; 
he should have compelled by example, not cajoled by fine 
phrases. Yet, with all his defects from a dandy's per- 
fection, he impressed himself on the 'Eighties of the nine- 
teenth century quite as sharply as did Brummel on an 
earlier period. 

Wilde's essay on " Pen, Pencil and Poison " belongs 
memorably in the literature on dandyism. Thomas Grif- 
fiths Wainewright, friend of Charles Lamb, was, we are 
told, dandy as well as poisoner and artist. " Like Dis- 
raeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and 
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and 



CRITICISM 371 

pale lemon-colored gloves were well known " ; he " sought 
to be somebody rather than to do something. He recog- 
nised that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style 
no less than the arts that seek to express it." That 
sentence must rank with the other memorable definitions 
of dandyism. Wainewright, we are told, maintained his 
own dandyism at a difficult crisis ; in prison, he said : 
" I have been determined through life to hold the position 
of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. 
It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates 
of a cell shall take his morning's turn of sweeping out. 
I occupy the cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but 
they never offer me the broom ! " In that touch we find 
Wainewright's right to rank with Brummel delirious at 
Caen, and with Beau Nash, Scrope Davies, and Wilde 
himself, dying squalid and proud deaths. 

A German writer, Franz Blei, writing of Wilde, ob- 
served that " English society is always ruled by a dandy 
and not only since the days of Brummel and Selwyn. 
The greater the dandy, the more absolute his rule. Wilde 
was the acknowledged master and tyrant ; he lashed that 
society and spared not, and it cringed before him, since 
he was dandy by the grace of God. . . . Wilde was 
both a dandy and a genius ; democracy can suffer neither 
in the long run ... as a dandy he was of the 
type that spends its life declaiming. No poet ever set 
art above nature more nobly than Wilde, for his ambition 
was not to be a poet, but more than that: a dandy. 
. . . He could assert his paradox only as a dandy; 
as poet he went counter to it. Then he had fashioned 
art into his life; now (in " the Ballad of Reading Gaol ") 
life fashioned him to his art." 

As to whether dandyism to-day be dead or not, there 
are conflicting views. Certainly, since Wilde, there have 
been but faint efforts to deserve the name. Some hold 
that dandyism, if not quite dead, is at least obscured 
by the bright light which beats on it from a thousand 



372 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

newspaper offices, and insist that a dandy, to-day, faces 
a harder task than did Brummel, since our mode of male 
apparel has reached a rigidity hard to conform to in- 
dividual distinction. But those pessimists, I think, mis- 
take the material of dandyism for its soul. To side 
with the pessimists would be to admit that because all 
tailors cut upon the same pattern, one man must seem 
as commonly dressed as all his neighbors. 

Those who believe there can be no more dandyism in 
the world are of identical kidney with those who say that 
there need be no more style in writing. If you will 
hark back to my chapter on style and on masks, you 
will see how these two matters — of dandyism in litera- 
ture, and style in writing — have nearly all their qualities 
in common. 

Let the professors open ever so wide the gates to 
mediocrity, only by the saving salt of style, in life and 
letters, can American Art survive. Study but ever so 
little the literature of dandyism and you will recoil with 
the more horror from the floodtide of the commonplace 
that is drowning individuality. 

The dandy is a critic of life. He shows perfection to 
the others. The critic exercised that same function upon 
letters. Wilde was both Dandy and Critic. 

If we here in America had more such critics as that, 
neither our living nor our writing would be of such a 
twilight monotone. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

In the house of art, as in the world itself, there are 
many mansions. Fresh air blows in some ; while in others, 
as in that of Wilde, there is the odor of the hot-house, 
the patches and perfume of the posed rather than of 
the real. There is room for all. It is as absurd to decry 
the cult of the barbaric as to deplore the popularity of 
Mere Manners. To be human and logical, we must 
admit the existence of both the unkempt, dirty, untram- 
meled ragamuffin as of the self-conscious posturing 
dandy. Watteau painted one truth ; Josef Israels painted 
another; Degas is as true as Tadema. The truth has 
as many colors as the rainbow, and life admits of as 
many interpretations as there are temperaments. 

Attempting to trace in America something of an in- 
ternational wave of " youthfulness " in art contemporane- 
ous with Oscar Wilde's career meets with but slight suc- 
cess. In the province of consciously postured art but 
little had been achieved since Poe died. When we re- 
member that against Poe the tumult and the shouting 
have even now not quite died down, we must realise that 
the climate here has never been of the best for the most 
precious expressions of art. Conscious postures have 
mostly produced refinement of artistry ; one hesitates to 
imagine a crude talent with impudence enough to at- 
tempt definite attitudes in any of the arts ; or, where 
such crude talents — as in the case of Hamlin Garland 
counseling ploughboy prose, or of George Ade proclaim- 
ing " the zippy show " to be the salvation of the Ameri- 
can drama — have achieved such impudence, we put them 
as soon as possible into oblivion. Many a crude talent 
we have welcomed; the Whitmans, the Joaquin Millers, 



374 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

and even the Jack Londons appealed to us simply be- 
cause, however uncouthly, they voiced something of our 
great cosmic crudity itself; finished artists filled us, an 
unfinished people, with distrust. Because Ambrose Bierce 
wrote with as crystally cold an art as De Maupassant, 
we long kept aloof from him because — if beyond the vague 
distrust of over-refined workmanship we had any excuse 
at all ! — we thought him in no wise " American " as an 
artist. 

Though we were introduced many years ago, by Stuart 
Merrill, by Vance Thompson, by James Huneker, by 
Philip Hale, and others, to many of those men who, 
in other parts of the world, were producing art, con- 
scious of its attitudes and its youthfulness, we have 
never been properly enthusiastic over such product, and 
if by chance such article emanated domestically we pre- 
ferred a dignified, not to say stupid, aloofness. Against 
Verlaine, against Arthur Rimbaud and his beloved vowels, 
against Dowson and his " yesternight " and against 
Arthur Symons — the Symons of the day before Youth 
gave him warning — we had little to show. That entire, 
considerable school of art which, according to the tem- 
perament of the critic, has been dubbed decadent, sym- 
bolistic, impressionistic, romantic or merely Young, had 
but slight American equivalent. Lafcadio Hearn intro- 
duced us to some of the most modern gems of Orient 
and Occident ; William Sharp adopted the pose of 
Maeterlinck and other Belgians ; but in the main we 
looked scornfully on that phase of art; and the names 
of Richard Dehmel, of Jules Laforgue, of Franz Wede- 
kind and of O. J. Bierbaum were unknown to our majority 
while it prattled glibly about the " best seller." 

Only for a short period in the last decade of the nine- 
teenth century was there the slightest effort away from 
commercial art in America. That was during the reign 
of what we may call the pamphlet and the poster move- 
ments. 



CRITICISM 375 

After the Chicago Exposition of 1893, which had done 
something to spur the American public toward appre- 
ciation of the finer things of life, there ensued a period 
of material depression, which did not lift until 1895. 
There began then one of the most curious revivals in 
taste that our time has witnessed. Very little of that 
has survived, but it may be interesting to glance at some 
of that movement's illusory eccentricities. Looked at 
from this distance, no definite result seems to have been 
reached. Some clever young men came to light in the 
course of that movement; but they have now become 
as orthodox as their elders. Yet for the oddities and im- 
pertinences — the evidences of reckless youth — that time 
brought forth, it will be entertaining to recall it. 

You may easily trace the inception of the movement 
to the English " Yellow Book," that bilious explosion 
of long smoldering revolt against conservatism in Eng- 
lish art and letters. Inasmuch as an American, Henry 
Harland, was at the helm, and the triumphant notoriety 
of Oscar Wilde was the main cargo, the " Yellow Book " 
did not fail of effect on the more impressionable younger 
element in America. The fascinating drawings of an 
uncannily clever youth, Aubrey Beardsley, aided in giving 
this periodical a scandalous success. Scandal removed 
Mr. Wilde ; Beardsley forsook the " Yellow Book " for 
the " Savoy," and consumption removed him from this 
life; but the seed was already planted in America, and 
there appeared a crop of strangely fashioned periodicals, 
preaching fantastic doctrines, uttering weird thoughts, 
but all expressive of youth and of dreams of non-com- 
mercial art. 

The University of Harvard was, by way of Alma 
Mater at least, responsible for the first efflorescence of the 
New in American periodical literature. It is true that 
the " Chap-Book " was born in 1894 ; but its matter and 
manner were so much upon the models indicated by the 
" Yellow Book " and the " Butterfly "— L. Raven-Hill's 



376 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

charming magazine, which to-day is still the delight of 
many a wise collector — that it may be reckoned as in the 
movement of 1895. Started by the energy of two Har- 
vard students and the poetic intelligence of Mr. Bliss 
Carman, a Canadian, this cheeky little cherub of a maga- 
zine met with a peculiar success. Its tinyness ; its calm 
audacity; its inconsequential airiness — touched the key- 
note of wide appreciation. The first volume took its 
place among the rarities of the amateur. The watchword 
of the magazine was : Fads ! If there was no fad in 
existence it created one. It made a fad of artistic post- 
ers ; it fostered the cult of Aubrey Beardsley's Ameri- 
can contemporary, Will H. Bradley. In the " Chap- 
Book " was found much New Humor ; but eventually 
this enfant terrible began to give pink teas, to make 
much of Great Personages, and curb its bold imperti- 
nence ; the novelty was exhausted ; the old audacity gone ; 
and before its pale insipidity public interest flagged and 
died. So, eventually, did the " Chap-Book." Yet it had 
started the movement. 

Philadelphia had a quarterly entitled " Moods," to 
which contributed Walter Harte, and John Sloan, an 
artist who has since become known. San Francisco 
joined the chorus with " The Lark," the maddest of all 
these youthful flings into the absurd. Printed abomi- 
nably on butcher's paper, appearing at no regular in- 
tervals ; it was unfailingly original in its candor and 
simplicity. It was a vigorously successful pose; a prac- 
tical joke upon the public. Gelett Burgess was one of 
" The Lark's " mainstays. 

Harte's " Fly-leaf " and Hubbard's " Philistine " have 
been referred to on another page. From New York itself, 
in all that period of revolt, there came but one memorable 
note of sympathy. Though for years the centre of the 
publishing business of the United States — the gold-field 
luring artistic miners from the rest of the continent — 
New York would have required of the historian of this 



CRITICISM 377 

movement the oblivion of omission had it not been for 
three bold buccaneers : Mr. Vance Thompson, writer, 
and Messrs. T. E. Powers and T. Fleming, artists. They 
expressed themselves fortnightly in " Mile. New York " 
fearlessly and unconventionally. They scorned the public 
so as to gain approval of the few. 

Few of these evidences of a one-time artistic uplift in 
American individualism have survived. Among these is 
" The Papyrus," medium for Michael Monahan's Irish 
free-lance. In the main, there is left of all that pamphlet 
movement nothing but a reputation or two. 

The art of the affiche traveled about this time across 
the Atlantic. The achievement of Cheret, Grasset, Stein- 
len and Beardsley was paralleled by that of Bradley, 
Louis Rhead, Edward Penfield, John Sloan, Ethel Reed, 
F. A. Nankivell and other American artists. A periodical, 
the " Echo," appeared on purpose to foster the cult of 
the artistic poster; despite much exaggeration, a definite 
improvement in the art of pictured advertisement was 
gained. 

It was an interesting period, and, in view of the 
dominant commercialism of this later decade, somewhat 
pathetic to look back on. It had plenty of the follies 
of youth ; but it meant real artistic ferment, struggling 
growth ; it was a battle for new life in our art. 

Where is such battling now? Has our prosperity 
indeed made futile all those young ideals? 

It was not until ten years later that the note of that 
time recurred in a slender volume of verse which, though 
by an American, brought back all that crew of man- 
nered artists, Wilde and Rimbaud, and Ernest Dowson. 
To a few critical persons the curious, precious verses 
of Wilbur Underwood, appearing infrequently in more 
or less obscure corners, had been known for some years ; 
but until his volume " A Book of Masks " appeared, it 



378 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was not possible to consider him any more seriously than 
we can consider the other estrays of genius who wander 
now and then, however, briefly, into the most barren 
places. The smother of mediocrity keeps these beyond 
the public ken, while the ephemera of the many-tongued 
fools are shouted from the house-tops. 

This small figure is significant enough; against its 
exotic outlines the robust prosperity of our best sellers 
looms all the more fatuously inartistic. Significantly 
enough, too, " A Book of Masks " was published not in 
America, but in London. The title itself makes any 
lengthy elucidation of this fragment of precious art un- 
necessary ; the volume is almost the only evidence that in 
America there is still some stir of that art which filled 
Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Jules Laforgue, and Ernest Dow- 
son. Between Underwood's " Book of Masks," indeed, 
and Dowson's " Pierrot of the Minute," the affinity of 
thought is obvious. The carnival and the mask inter- 
ested this young American as they have no other of his 
countrymen ; his book is almost the only one that seems 
to have expressed such belief in masquerade and manner 
as my chapters on those subjects tried to outline. 

Francis Saltus — of the Americans attempting exotic 
art in rhyme — tried for universality, passion, blasphemy, 
landscapes and liquors ; the author of " The Book of 
Jade " reeked bitterly of mortality ; Sylvester Viereck 
attempted imitation only of the more reprehensible of 
Oscar Wilde's moods. Slight as Was Wilbur Under- 
wood's intention, it was, at least, undisturbed. He 
chose but one small space, one quaint corner; yet there 
he stands alone. The tragedy, the comedy, the pose and 
the passion in the human masquerade, those were the 
strings on which he played. 

Unreal and shadowy his subjects seem; Pierrots, Pier- 
rettes, Columbines, Harlequins and Fauns hover faintly 
through his pages ; he shows us only the most fantastic 
masks, the roses of carnival and the ashes of remorse. 



CRITICISM 379 

The people to whom the precious, the gem-like in art is 
as a red rag, and who wave somewhat hysterically the 
American flag, doubtless found plenty of objections to 
Mr. Underwood's slender volume. The foreign model at- 
tracted him ; he used French titles, and French atmos- 
phere ; he uses the " E finita la comedia " of the strolling 
players, while one of his poems is addressed to the mem- 
ory of Aubrey Beardsley. His is, plainly, and simply, 
art as international as Carnival itself. Carnival's figures, 
the labels of its masks, have ever been the same in all 
languages. Mr. Underwood knew that ; bravely he took 
his position, and then, his subject and intent sure, how- 
ever slight, he achieved in " A Book of Masks " suc- 
cessful art. 

The book should lie with its prose brother, Max Beer- 
bohm's " Happy Hypocrite." It is the finest written ex- 
pression in English of the black and white art of Aubrey 
Beardsley. Posed and precious as it is, there is no note 
of sensuality; though its message to the man is clear, 
a child might also read it. This is not the bizarre or the 
cruel sensuality the author of " Salome " was so ob- 
sessed by; Mr. Underwood's dominant strain was one of 
sadness ; his verse had the proper solemn note of carnival 
leaping recklessly toward a bitter morrow. 

Inasmuch as the tiny volume is almost singular in the 
pose of its art, in America, where the whole field of 
belles lettres — to say nothing of belles lettres produced 
by the younger men — is so sadly abandoned, I cannot 
forbear quoting a line or so from " A Book of Masks." 
The whole note of the book, I think, is in the closing 
poem, entitled " The End " ; where this occurs : 

The hour has struck; with sudden grace 
The mask is slipped from each worn face, 
And desolate eyes meet desolate eyes 
In glances of a lone surmise 
That searching deeply only see 
The veils of utter mystery; 



380 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

The lights are flickering in the lamps. 
The air grown sharp with earthy damps, 
O little ghosts of sad delight, 
Pass wearily into the night. 

No young man in America has done verse more purely 
chiseled. Nor is it altogether marble and masque that 
engage him ; occasionally he strikes a human note, as you 
may see in these quoted fragments from " A Girl " : 

This young girl — this girl is dead; 
From the light and laughter fled; 
Into darkness and still space; 
Cover o'er the strange white face; 
Once her laughter starred the night, 
Now her laughter's taken flight. 

Small her breasts were like a boy's, 
Moulded for all subtle joys, 
Cool and flower-like her lips, 
Straight and delicate her hips 
Never meant for motherhood — 
Sin made her and found her good. 

This young girl — this girl is dead; 
From the light and laughter fled; 
Ladies, brutes and fellow men, 
We are laughing once again, 
As of old the noise and light 
Stream out on the ancient night, 
As of old wine-flushed and fair, 
We make joy with mocking air; 
But through all our fevered arts 
Steals a shadow on our hearts. 

It is possible that this slender book expressed that slen- 
der talent to the full; yet, even so, we may cherish that 
tiny specimen of art all too rare on this side the Atlantic. 
Aside from the pamphlet and poster movement re- 
ferred to, " A Book of Masks " was one of the few evi- 



CRITICISM 381 

dences of what elsewhere had been a notable renascence 
in the more modern forms of art and literature. 

That renascence showed itself last in Germany, but, 
once established, flourished there more vigorously, and 
had more lasting effect on the entire artistic product of 
the nation. 

However this movement, this product of what by some 
were called " Les Jeunes," may have excited popular 
derision at first, it was an expression of mental revolt 
against artistic formulas long since become inadequate. 
The cause of cosmopolitanism in art was notably en- 
hanced by this stir among the younger men. One year 
the " Courrier Francais " — to cite the art of color and 
line rather than of letters — introduced its French readers 
to all the British black-and-white men, and reproduced 
Bradley and Penfield posters ; American enthusiasts be- 
gan to collect the work of Vallotton, of Felicien Rops, 
and in England the same persons who admired Dudley 
Hardy and the Beggarstaffs found time for the appre- 
ciation of Mucha and Anquetin. In Germany, for a 
time, art followed literature but slowly; Sudermann, 
Hauptmann and Humperdinck kept one side of German 
art to the fore ; but equivalents to the " Savoy," " La 
Plume " or the " Chap-Book " did not appear until 
1896. 

Then, finally, in " Youth " ( Jugend) the Germans 
joined the chorus. As in all the other evidences of the 
newer movement, this was, in its inception, a cosmopoli- 
tan enterprise. Sketches by Steinlen and Jossot, and 
verses by Verlaine, were side by side with the work of 
the Germans. Eventually this paper, with " Simplicis- 
simus," also of Munich, became the medium for all the 
younger elements in Teuton art; there is to-day no more 
artistic, nor more successful weekly paper in the world 
than " Jugend." In that very success lies, too, the 
secret of all the success gained by an army of artists in 
poetry and prose whose work has, in the last two decades, 



382 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

changed the whole tone of German art and German taste 
until to-day it is as advanced, as tolerant, as catholic as 
that of Paris. 

Just as through the " Yellow Book " you may trace 
the impetus for " Jugend,"' so through Oscar Wilde 
you may find the beginnings of an entire, fascinating 
school of German artists in prose and verse. 

As fascinating, to the student of literature, as that 
Romantic Movement which culminated nearly a century 
ago with Heinrich Heine, was the " UeberbrettP." Which 
is as if you said Super-Stage. It was an effort, begun 
about the first year of this century, to bridge the gulf 
between real art, — literary and musical, — and the music- 
hall. It occurred to such men as Ernst Von Wolzogen, 
Detlev Von Liliencron, Richard Dehmel, Otto Erich 
Hartleben, Frank Wedekind, Otto Julius Bierbaum, and 
other artists in prose and verse, that the real lyric, ad- 
mirable in print, might just as well be sung on the variety 
stage as the utter rot common to it; so they joined in a 
delightful fantastic plot to elevate the public via the 
" UeberbrettP." During the years that this movement 
reigned in Germany a hundred or so lyrical gems by 
these poets were set to music by Oscar Straus, Victor 
Hollaender, Paul Lincke, Bogumil Zepler, James Roth- 
stein and others ; strange little plays for marionettes were 
performed ; and, despite much ridicule and caricature, the 
entire tone of music-hall art was raised as surely as, in 
France, England and America, the art of advertis- 
ing had been improved by the cult of the artistic 
affiche. 

In that extraordinary analysis of an unscrupulous 
genius " Stilpe " — a novel to be ranked with what George 
Moore, Jules Claretie and Ernst Von Wolzogen have done 
on the artistic temperament — O. J. Bierbaum outlined 
both the UeberbrettP movement, and the personal career 
of Frank Wedekind. It was more than outline, it was 
forecast. It is true that the liaison between literature 



CRITICISM 383 

and the stage did not last — there were enough Mrs. 
Grundys even in Germany to frown it down — but it 
made history. It gave birth to the cabaret; and we still 
have left to us, in imperishable print and score, some 
charming lyrics set to haunting music. Gems by Heine 
himself were used in the course of the Ueberbrettl' move- 
ment, as were trifles by Catulle Mendes ; the Gallic trend 
in all was typical of a tendency that had been encroach- 
ing on all German art. The caricaturists showed us 
Schiller as he would have appeared if he had lived to-day : 
singing his own songs in public. . . . That was all 
comic enough; but the thing itself was immensely valu- 
able; it voiced the great change that was moving over 
continental art ; and it was a brief revolt against the 
reign of rubbish in the domain of so-called entertain- 
ment. 

What have we to show, in England or America, against 
the delightful lyrics to music the German Ueberbrettl' 
has left to posterity? In America, at any rate, I recall 
little enough: some Eugene Field lyrics in melodies by 
William Pommer; some Austin Dobson set to music by 
Francis Saltus ; and some tasteful matter used by Ethel- 
bert Nevin for his charming airs. . . . What else? 
Little enough. 

It was a tragic history, too, that of the Ueberbrettl' ; 
under railway arches, in obscure halls, it flourished 
briefly in its attempt to put real art and literature into 
the scheme of public entertainment. Art for the music- 
hall . . . ! Too much literature ; too little entertain- 
ment, — said the paying public ; and the experiment ended 
in failure; a tragedy for which, as usual, the stupid 
newspapers and the stupider public were to blame. In 
" Stilpe," too, Bierbaum had forecast that tragedy. Yet, 
since we have those many charming books, in prose and 
verse, those many haunting melodies, this was a failure 
like so many others which, seen from a distance, was 
success. 



384 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

As you have seen something of what, in the cabaret, 
the Ueberbrettl' movement sank to, let us try to see what 
was the first dream of the artists in whom it began. For 
a collection of " German Chansons," to which contributed, 
in addition to those already named, Rudolf Alexander 
Schroeder, Arno Holz, Alfred Walter Heymel, Ludwig 
Finckh, and Gustav Falke, Bierbaum wrote an Intro- 
duction that contained the creed of these young radicals. 
Let me extract therefrom some salient sentences : 

Art for the variety-hall! A shameful desecration, do yon 
say? . . . No doubt they will say so; but in putting our 
art at the music-hall's service we are serious enough. We 
happen to have the idea that art may be made a part of all 
life. Artists, to-day, fashion chairs — chairs both useful and 
ornamental. So do we mean to write verses that will be read, 
not only be read in the study, but be hummed by the amuse- 
ment-loving public. Art and craft in lyric poetry — there is 
our text. On that you may easily build the laws which our 
chansons must observe. You must be able to sing our songs; 
that is the main point. You must be able to amuse, with 
these songs, not merely an audience of aesthetes, but a gen- 
eral average. . . . Just as the Free Theatres have lifted 
the general taste a little, so we hope, by putting art into the 
music-hall, to raise that taste also. . . . The townsman 
of to-day has no longer the time or patience for great drama ; 
he has, if I may say so, music-hall nerves; he wants change 
— variety. And that is what we must remember if we would 
appeal to other than an esthetic minority, and if, as artists, 
we could really influence life itself. 

My friend Stilpe, I think, first voiced this whole idea, and 
with his untrammeled bohemian spirit sketched such a scheme. 
What happened to him, you know from the book that bears 
his name. To-day we are to try and lift that scheme from 
fiction into reality. 

Something like that wrote Otto Julius Bierbaum, in 
1900, in "Munich, in the Month of Saharet"; I have 
adapted rather than translated from his little pronun- 



CRITICISM 385 

ciamento. The " Stilpe " prophecy held true again ; for 
the movement disappeared; but the men and their work 
remain. Without further reference to the group in gen- 
eral, every member of which has written prose and verse 
that will repay the reading and which tempts the trans- 
lator — if the very essence of the lyric did not forbid its 
betrayal into other tongues, as has been so often shown 
in Heine and Verlaine — let us glance at a few of them 
a moment or two before coming to the one who seemed 
most representative. 

Ernst Von Wolzogen is a figure whom we will hardly 
equal in English. Actor-manager and poet and com- 
poser, he has been artist as well as business man. Upon 
his own stage he has sung his own verses to his own 
music. He has written for the burgess as well as for the 
bohemian ; you will find the family circle reading one side 
of his art quite unconscious of the radical activities of 
his other side. He has written humorously of the Ger- 
man officers ; he is a gentleman and a scholar, he has 
been a crack officer and he is a music-hall star. His 
novel " Der KraftMeyer " is the best picture of the 
Abbe Liszt, and of musical bohemianism in general, that 
you will find in German. It ranks with " Stilpe," and 
Shaw's " Love Among the Artists " and Geo. Moore. 

Frank Wedekind and his play, " Spring's Awakening," 
came into general international notice ten years after 
his Ueberbrettl' public knew him. His was an example 
nothing less than extraordinary. Nothing in " Stilpe," 
the hero of which seemed sketched accurately on Wede- 
kind, was more startling than his career has been. He 
has written and he has lived passionately and bitterly ; , 
and all that written and experienced passion he has ex- 
posed, as actor, to the public. He has been his own 
star in tragic episodes written by himself from his own 
life. One does not know where to find a parellel to him. 
His has been the blasphemy and bitterness of a Francis 
Saltus and an Aristide Bruant combined. What happened 



386 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

to him of tragedy, he made mumming use of. As if Oscar 
Wilde, writing (instead of " De Profundis ") an acting 
tragedy of prison life, had cast himself for a star part and 
played it in a public theatre. . . . Will Visscher, an 
American rhymester, deserted the Muse, I believe, and 
became a player of " plantation darky " parts on the 
American stage ; but — that is as bread and milk to the 
strong meat of Wedekind. The Wilde comparison is 
the only one to fit this case. 

Let me cite but one example of Wedekind's work, 
printed in the first years of the century in that brilliant 
publication " Die Insel " in which appeared translations 
from Walter Pater, from Oscar Wilde, and plays and 
verses by Ernest Dowson, by Arthur Symons, and Fran- 
cis Jammes, and innumerable others. Here were printed 
the lyrics by all that crew of minstrels I have named; 
here were the plays to music by Bierbaum which have 
since taken rank with the most artistic of their kind, 
and may be seen and heard to-day throughout Ger- 
many, and were the inspiration for such slight efforts 
as the " In a Persian Garden " trifles of art and music 
which even we in America have witnessed ; Frank Wede- 
kind's play, to which your attention is called, was en- 
titled " Pandora's Casket." It was nothing less than a 
dramatic picture of the descent into that life which no- 
toriously lured the perverted imagination of those ma- 
niacs whom the newspapers labeled Jack the Ripper. In 
three languages, from the luxury of that world which 
recruits the Follies Bergeres to that which gathers in the 
slums of Whitechapel, that hideous descent is painted 
in ghastly syllables ; the final tragedy is — nothing less 
than that crime with which our journals and our psychi- 
atrists were once so engaged. 

But it is time we came to the literary leader of that 
crew which so quixotically tried, in Germany, to divorce 
the music-hall from the inartistic, just as the men of 



CRITICISM 387 

the Criterion and the other independent theatres had 
tried, in America, to divorce the theatre from the com- 
mercial. His name is Otto Julius Bierbaum. 

" Never again," said Otto Julius Bierbaum, when dis- 
aster swamped his little Trianon Theatre under the rail- 
way arch in Berlin. He had tried to give the populace 
the ballad that would stand print, set to music that would 
lift itself into the street upon the lips of the listeners. 
He had tried to bridge the gulf between literature and 
the " halls." To all appearances he had failed ; the pub- 
lic still preferred, as before, platitudinous doggerel and 
A-B-C music. But Bierbaum was a humorist ; he smiled 
and took to other activities. 

Always something new, something modern. He was 
a modern. You would not have thought him a German 
at all, if you had the conventional figure of the German 
scholiast in mind. It is so easy to forget Heine. . . 

Bierbaum is one of the few interesting figures in con- 
temporary literature. Name me, if you will, the pic- 
turesque adventurers in letters to-day ! Surely the fin- 
gers of one hand will suffice, sweep as you may the field 
of insular, continental or American art. Whistler is 
gone ; Bernard Shaw becomes a convention like the others. 
. Youth, alas, is so soon faded. The literary ad- 
venturer of to-day becomes the obese banker of to-mor- 
row. The buccaneer and the butterfly turn into tax- 
paying citizens. But there is still Otto Julius. 

For years I hugged to myself the joy his work has 
brought. Intending, time and again, appreciative ex- 
ploitation, I have hesitated, selfishly ; as one who, know- 
ing one of nature's loveliest nooks forbears to whisper it 
to vile mankind. But, inasmuch as he is that rare fellow, 
a Man of Letters in every sense of the word; poet, novel- 
ist, critic, playwright and propagandist for the art of 
life ; and as his equivalent is absolutely lacking in our 
American scheme of literature, he must now be used to 



388 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

point my moral. If his career, creative and critical, can 
in the slightest degree be paralleled in our world of 
" best sellers," we shall surely all be glad to know it. 

His work covers a wide and varied range. There are 
countless novels and tales ; many plays and playlets. His 
stories range from " Stilpe," that pungent mixture of 
satire and realism, to the " Sentimental Journey in a 
Motor Car " and his free version of an Italian fairy-tale 
(by Collodis) "The Adventures of Zaepfel Kern." 
" Stilpe " portrayed, as has already been suggested, to 
the Nth degree the logical career of a modern unscrupu- 
lous genius in words. Drink and genius mingle. But not 
as in Poe's case; this is more essentially of to-day; 
decadent tendencies are as burningly set forth as when 
Shaw rebukes the owners of widower's houses. Here was 
the tragedy in the curse of cleverness. It outlined the 
career of more than one victim of such cleverness ; Wede- 
kind has already been mentioned. 

Then there was the poetry. Volumes on volumes of it. 
It was the poetry that first caught me. 

We are not always young; the first fine delight in 
Swinburne is hardly regained. Life in our real world 
leaves little room for enjoyment of the lyric moods. Is 
it the stress of the world, or the decline in lyricism? 
Whatever the reason, the fact is patent; the lyric mo- 
ments that stick in the memory have been all too few. 
A line or two of Aldrich, something in Carman and 
Hovey's Vagabondian verse; what else is in the majority's 
memory? The Lyric Muse, you are to remember, is all I 
harp on ; she happens to be the only lady of the lot who 
interests me; that is my luck or my misfortune; you may 
call it what you like. 

For the true test comes in the lyric. 

That it is far easier to achieve the measure and man- 
ner of poetry than poetry itself is an old and obvious 
truism. Many of us have been put to making Latin 



CRITICISM 389 

verses in our youth, and the fact that we could copy, 
however badly, the outlines of hexameter and pentame- 
ter, was not worth a button as indication of any real 
poetry concealed in us. For any person of average in- 
telligence it is possible to imitate the rolling syllables of 
the epic or the ode; the old and venerable models of 
narrative by metric rote lend themselves to the emulation 
of even fifth-rate minds. The lyric is the test of true 
poetic art. 

That may not be the generally adopted gospel. Many 
learned professors dispute it. The grand manner, the 
nobility of thought expressed in magnificent profundity, 
the vitally dramatic told in archaic grandiloquence — all 
these have their protagonists. Well, we are as we are ; let 
our newly laureled American Milton be sterling or plated ; 
— it has been my part never to see that element in 
poetry save from the viewpoint of G. B. Shaw, when 
he declared that he wrote his copyright version of " The 
Admirable Bashville " in blank verse for the reason that 
he had no time to put it into decent prose. 

The only poet who sings because he must, not because 
he has an infinite capacity for taking pains — and causing 
them — is the lyric poet. That phrase of Carlyle's is 
simply one of those resounding ones handed down to 
posterity by that unquestioning portion of the public 
which does its thinking by proxy. When you can quote 
from the work of our professors of poetry in " the 
grand manner " such lyric music as is in Heine, in Swin- 
burne, — in what Mrs. Malaprop calls Kelly and Sheets, — 
yes, even in Dobson, in Aldrich and in Carman and Bier- 
baum, — I will stand converted. Until then this simple 
belief remains to me: that only the music, in thought 
and metre, excuses poetry ; all else, even Whitman and 
Henley, is prose forced into outmoded garments. Whit- 
man was a great poet who wrote as he did for the same 
reason that Joaquin Miller wore a flannel shirt and top- 
boots; he was taking pains to startle, as did the wor- 



390 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

shipers of the sunflower and the green carnation. He, 
like Henley, could find the lyric note well enough when 
he wanted to ; only the desire for " being different " 
forced him to outrageous metres. 

If you care for good spirited singing word-stuff, even 
the lighter minstrels must ever appeal more to you than 
the Miltons. In the supposedly proper Jovian attitude 
in criticism of poetry I am an utter incompetent ; when 
you have said music, you have said my all. Mr. Hamil- 
ton Mabie, a learned authority who deserves distinction 
for preferring William Austin to Ambrose Bierce in the 
domain of the American short-story, once exclaimed hap- 
pily over the gay temper and charming fancy of a pleas- 
ant English minstrel, Alfred Noyes. That only 
confirmed me in the belief that Mr. Noyes was no more 
a poet, no jollier a minstrel, than a great many artists 
whom Mr. Mabie probably never heard of. In Mr. 
Noyes's ballad of " The Barrel-Organ " there was a fre- 
quently recurring refrain : 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time; 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from Lon- 
don!) 
And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in Summer's 
wonderland, 

Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from Lon- 
don!). 

which was pleasant enough, but surely nothing wonderful. 
Even the trick of repeating certain catchy portions of 
lines — necessary in some sorts of minstrelsy — had been 
exhibited quite as effectively in a poem called " The Lost 
Tavern," which begins thus : 

There used to he a tavern at the corner of a wood, 

(Jolly boys and ladies knew the way) ; 
Lordy, but the lunches and the vintages were good ! 

(Jolly boys and ladies knew the way.) 



CRITICISM 391 

Here a step and there a step, the sun a-shining warm, 
Here a step and there a step, the mood a-dripping balm, 
Laugh along and sing along, a lady on your arm, 
(Jolly boys and ladies knew the way). 

Which was by Henry Rightor, of New Orleans ; and by 
no means invented, as James Huneker once invented an 
Australian minstrel. With Rightor there are several 
Australians who might indeed be named: Victor Daley 
and Henry Lawson ; all quite as good as Mr. Mabie's 
fancy. Even our own Wallace Irwin's " Song for a 
Cracked Voice " comes well up to that " barrel-organ " 
tune ; while I would not give them both for Otto Julius 
Bierbaum's " Der Alte Orgelmann Singt." 

How spell the delight the first dip into a volume of 
Bierbaum's collected verse gave forth? Heine, Verlaine, 
Dobs on and Gilbert ; some touch of all was there ; and 
something singularly individual, something starkly — Otto 
Julius. For years have I vowed I would translate some 
of those lovely lyrics ; always the hopelessness of not be- 
traying their loveliness prevailed. Consider the beauties 
gone to dust in translation ; not even Bayard Taylor, 
Andrew Lang, Francis Saltus and Austin Dobson, have 
always surmounted the barriers of another tongue ; the 
only great translations in the world are in prose, as 
Baudelaire's, and Lafcadio Hearn's. So I still shy from 
that task; the wit, the melody, the mixture of modernity 
and rococo, all fuse to make the lover of letters despair 
of ever being able to give English readers a notion of 
how admirably Bierbaum served the Lyric Muse in Ger- 
man. For a quarter of a dollar, for a shilling, you 
could purchase more lyric joy, in his collection — the 
first edition of which held nearly 400 pages — than you 
could buy in our language for four times that sum. Who, 
moreover, in our lands, would buy poetry in paper bind- 
ing? What book of verse, in America, — whether paper, 



392 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

cloth, boards, or plush a la Hubbard — ever sold to the 
extent of 40,000 copies in five or six years? Will you 
pardon this digression into facts, away from poetry? It 
was necessary for your understanding of how cheaply 
the finest lyric joy in recent years was possible. 

Otto Julius Bierbaum, to be sure, was no stranger to 
those few who had kept their eyes open beyond their 
own parish ; the years of the " Yellow Book," of " Pan," 
of the "Bunte Vogel," and of the " Insel," were still 
vivid in the memory; when that charming little poetic 
pocket-piece called " Der Irrgarten Der Liebe " (Love's 
Maze) appealed from a bookseller's counter, the great 
financial risk was easily taken. The millionaires who build 
art galleries, who maintain private and public libraries, 
who engage in Bierbaum's own affair of lifting public 
taste by New Theatres, — have no conception of the 
profit to be had from that little volume, from that quar- 
ter of a dollar. 

Hardly a mood, gay or dim, but had its echo in those 
pages. You have already seen how, in this minstrelsy, 
there was much more than mere adroit versification, mere 
Dobsonian charm, or Gilbertian wit. It was touched 
with what you might call Gallic naughtiness ; and above 
all, the true music in it was proven by some half hun- 
dred of these lyrics being set to melodies by the best of 
the young composers in that period of the Ueberbrettl', 
when they were sung in the halls, the halls that once 
— under the railway arch — . . . Ah, well, never again, 
never again ! 

Slight as is this impression of a fine man of letters — 
whose career, for creation and criticism, like the careers 
of Oscar Wilde, of Bernard Shaw and George Moore, 
no American in American conditions has been able to 
approach — it must not conclude without some few bio- 
graphic facts about Otto Julius Bierbaum. This has 
been but an irresponsible glimpse at his work; for a 
really critical appreciation of him and his work a much 



CRITICISM 393 

longer chapter would become necessary; indeed, another 
book. . . . But, having introduced him, let me give 
the descriptive hints with which he himself not long ago 
supplied us. 

Born in Lower Silesia in 1865, the vice of versifica- 
tion lured him from the earliest years. To such an ex- 
tent did he give way to it, that, spurning, as he did, 
the constant outlook on profit as the chief and desirable 
end of man, he forfeited the esteem of the several good 
burghers and bureaucrats who had his fate at heart. His 
entire lack of principle was more completely proved when 
he showed himself unwilling to stick to his poetic last, 
and went about philandering with stories, novels, librettos, 
plays, ballets, travel-books, fairy-tales, and goodness 
knows what else. The rumor of wickedly large salaries 
paid him for editorial work threatened to ruin him; as 
did his account of a trip in an automobile ; only the 
sworn testimony that those had been stage salaries, and 
that he went motoring at another's expense, saved him. 
He never hopes to escape the public's avidity to connect 
the failure of the Trianon Theatre with his name. But 
by means of the bicycle and massage he hopes to retain 
his health. His lack of English prevents him playing 
lawn-tennis. He is done with Beardsleyism, and with 
books yellow, green or blue, for the time being; though 
he still insists that nothing that has youth in it can 
altogether die. And he admits to a fondness for Offen- 
bach. 

It was Kipling who, when the Vicomte d'Humieres 
mentioned him as a devotee of Offenbach, protested 
sternly in a letter to the newspapers. Between Kipling 
and Bierbaum there is then, in the article of music, a 
gulf fixed. Perhaps, despite his ballads, Kipling has no 
ear; I have known one other great man of letters who 
lacked that. . . . Otherwise, is there so great an 
incongruity in breathing these two names together? One 



394» THEIR DAY IN COURT 

was an earnest minstrel who mingled world-politics with 
his singing; the other was a genial singer of chansons 
who also fought valiantly, but never outside the domain 
of art and letters. 

A literary career so picturesquely adventurous, so valu- 
able in the creative and the critical, was it possible here 
in America? I do not think so. To say that we have 
not had men potentially as fine artists as Wilde, Bier- 
baum, Shaw and Moore, would be hazardous ; but to say 
that we have not duplicated their careers is merely to 
record history. 

Above all, such a career as Bernard Shaw's had been 
utterly impossible in American conditions. 



CHAPTER NINE 

Careful consideration of the changes that a decade 
or two can effect in the artistic fortunes of an individual 
or the art-intelligence of a public, discloses no case more 
entertaining than Bernard Shaw's. 

Nothing, to the sophisticated student of letters, is 
more certain than the turning of the wheel. What has 
gone up, in the immediate vision, at any rate, must 
come down. If it has gone up too far; if it has swung 
beyond the proper pull of gravity and there for a time 
remained suspended; there will always be found plenty 
of persons to restore what they conceive to be the right 
balance. 

Time was when by singing Shaw's praises you could 
provoke quite as much blank amazement as since legend- 
ary ages has been possible in those to whom Botticelli 
was a cheese. To proclaim the sanity of Shaw the critic, 
the infallibility of Shaw as an entertainer through the 
essay or the play, was only a decade and a half ago to 
invite the public's pity. We were thought to be madly 
astride a hobby-horse bound for No-Man's-Land. Slowly 
the wheel turned, until Shaw became as much a common 
craze as once his name had carried the hall-mark of dan- 
gerous eccentricity. Where once a single play of his, in 
Richard Mansfield's repertory, had been his only path 
across American footlights, the time came when nothing 
he had written for the theatre remained unperformed. 
As in the case of Wilde who, within a decade after being 
tabooed in our theatres and our libraries, is now come 
into his artistic own again, so in the case of Shaw 
there even came seasons when those who once sniffed at 
the alleged impudence of Shaw and at the impertinence 
395 



396 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

of his first adherents vied with one another in spilling 
on him the phrases of unintelligent adulation. 

We who, ten years ago, were endangering our own 
reputations for sanity by waving the banner of Shaw in 
the faces of managers (who were only mystified), pub- 
lishers (who were terrified), and public (which was 
healthily indifferent), lived to see Shaw, the playwright, 
as amazingly popular as once he was thought amazingly 
mad. The phrases that I myself used, all those years 
ago, in appreciation of the Shavian criticisms of life and 
of the arts, came blithely back to me from the lips 
and pens of people who, when my own enthusiasm was 
still in the infectious stage, imagined Bernard Shaw to 
be not so much a man as a phrase to frighten fools with. 
They would not be fools, not they; and so they left 
us reckless forerunners of fashion to die as decently and 
quietly as possible of the most fatal of all critical com- 
plaints : the playing bell-wether to sheep who have not 
yet been sufficiently frightened into following. Mutton- 
like, with neither memory nor conscience murdering the 
sleep or the intellectual somnambulism marking their days, 
those same managers, publishers and playgoers provided 
us, only a year or so ago, with a Shavian epidemic. He 
reached that treacherous point in the artistic career where 
indiscriminate fashion seized him for its own. In the 
intervals of being " crazy about bridge " people began 
to " dote on Shaw." 

Reaction was inevitable. Just as there are always 
those who never believe in a man until by some accident 
or pertinacity he becomes the mode, so there are always 
those seeking notoriety for themselves in dragging down, 
as well as in setting up, the moment's idols. Many at- 
tempt to climb in the train of another's fame, as witness 
the many who have taken to singing Omar in other dia- 
lects (Broadway, Cockney, and police-court), or that 
youth who not long ago declared from the vantage-point 
of Union Square that he had heard Oscar Wilde walking 



CRITICISM 397 

and talking in New York's streets. Others try to rise 
on the ruins they would make of others. Robert 
Buchanan, you may remember, attacked Rossetti. Even 
so, in the case of Shaw, the time came when as much 
energy was put to detracting from his reputation as 
had gone to the making of it. His drama was called 
conventional; his criticism was written down as mere jug- 
gling; his whole career was pictured as that of a Court 
Fool. Otherwise dignified English reviews were not spar- 
ing in such epithets as " blue-behinded ape." 

To ask why, to explain, is as futile as obvious. Shaw 
remains the same whom first we overmuch neglected and 
then overpraised. There was no falling off in his nor- 
mality of view, which affrighted us in our unconscious 
myopia, nor in the general sanity of his work. There 
was no reason for the changing attitude, save as there 
is reason for the wheel's turning. In the wake of in- 
telligent appreciation there must inevitably come, it 
seems, a period of unreasoning depreciation. 

The modish weary easily of their modes. Like the 
Athenians they seek always some new thing without ask- 
ing, as one hopes they did in Athens, if what was new 
yesterday is not finer than what looms new on the mor- 
row. The real artist, however, is always secure above the 
caprices of the mode. These may touch him or leave 
him; if his worth, his work, be real, it remains unspoilt 
by the feverish acclaim of fashion and unmoved by its 
Parthian arrows. Whatever the mode among our readers 
or our playgoers, Bernard Shaw remains, for the dis- 
criminating of to-day and to-morrow, the strong artistic, 
critical figure he has been since first he appeared on our 
horizon. Always, whether posing through essays, or 
through stories or through plays, he has been a most sane 
philosopher and an excellent entertainer. 

It is as a critic, as an essayist, that Shaw will live. 
His plays have never been aught but essays in dialogue 
form. Insincere as he has often pretended to be, as a 



398 THEIR BAY IN COURT 

socialist critic he has ever been sincere and congruous. 
Play upon play of his is merely a socialist essay in dis- 
guise. It is only as I may impress on you his importance 
as essayist, as critic, that I hope to enlist your interest 
in this now so hackneyed subject. Often enough, listen- 
ing to the chorus that sang praise or dispraise of Shaw 
the playwright, I came to doubt my own existence as 
pioneer in the matter; fortunately I had documents and 
dates in my favor. 

For some years we of the bygone century were still 
able to hug the thought that of Shaw the Critic we would 
not be robbed, because so much of him, expressing itself 
directly in that medium, was buried in the files of the 
London World, the Saturday Review and elsewhere. Be- 
sides, he had averred, years ago, that to rehash his journ- 
alistic matter was for him the depth of horror ; it was the 
desperate thought of that brink of shame which drove him 
to playwriting. Yet he was to break his word, to let his 
dramatic criticism, resurrected, be put into a book. He 
displayed these critical wares of his as publicly, as un- 
ashamedly, as if he had not specifically guaranteed to us, 
his faithful admirers from of old, the sole right and de- 
light in them. 

It was outrageous ! 

But there still remain the musical criticisms, the criti- 
cisms on paintings, decently buried; and there remains, 
above all else, for me to show how every line he wrote 
has been nothing else than criticism. 

It was in May of the year 1901 that I first observed 
in print that no Irishman of our time had been more 
unfalteringly entertaining than Bernard Shaw. 

In none is the Celt's inherent kinship to the mounte- 
bank more evident; not one has better used the cap and 
bells to impart logic in guise of paradox. Many of his 
qualities he shared with Oscar Wilde, some with George 
Moore. Each of these, for better or for worse, left his 



CRITICISM S99 

impress on the generation that saw the Nineteenth pass 
into the Twentieth Century. 

Bernard Shaw was, above all else, the prophet of the 
preface. These critical essays were at once socialist 
philippics, analyses of the modern theatre, modern art 
and modern taste, and the most persuasive form of 
autobiography. Though by now there are many books 
about Shaw, you may still find as much as is essential 
of his life and his intellectual evolutions — not to say con- 
vulsions — in his various Prefaces. He has robbed both 
his friends and his enemies of a task full of fascination : 
the writing of his biography. He made the occupation 
of rolling logs for him an impossibility; no other could 
compete with himself at that. Above all, his prefaces 
—indeed all his critical writing — teemed with those qual- 
ities so absent in American critical writing in the same 
period, personality and prejudice. 

Asking you to remember always that I consider noth- 
ing Shaw wrote to have been other than critical essays, I 
must, in this present glimpse at him, pay but indirect at- 
tention to such of his work as was presented in guise of 
novels and plays. 

Firstly, let us glance at his own whimsical account of 
how he reached his first successes as a critic. 

His novels had done him no good; he was a Socialist 
and so cared little for the brilliant life of Society. 
Chancing to have his eyes examined, he was told he had 
that rare quality, perfectly normal sight, conferring the 
power of seeing things accurately as they are. He saw, 
at once, the explanation of his failure in fiction ; he had 
still to earn his living by his pen ; he turned critic. And 
then, he declares, all he had to do " was to open my 
normal eyes, and with my utmost literary skill put the 
case exactly as I saw it, to be applauded as the most 
humorously extravagant paradoxer in London." In that 
sentence you have the gist of Shaw's attitude toward him- 



400 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

self and the public. It was much the same attitude as 
Bismarck's, who found truth the greatest of a diplomat's 
weapons ; it was the one thing that was never believed. 
His skill in putting his pen upon a truth which to others 
seemed a fiction was what made him so unusual. As for 
the ego in his critical cosmos, it took on another shape 
from that of Mr. Max Beerbohm; the latter, while still 
he was trying to force public attention to himself, took 
the pose of : " What a clever little boy am I ! " ; while 
Shaw only used such crystal, impeccable logic as Am- 
brose Bierce employed. His appearance of egoism came 
more from the hypocrisy of the multitude than from 
anything within himself. 

He continues, reminiscently, telling us of how he sur- 
vived " seven years of London's music, four or five years 
of London's pictures, and about as much of its current 
literature, wrestling critically with them with all my force 
and skill. . . . An Alpinist once, noticing the massive 
soles of my boots, asked me whether I climbed moun- 
tains. No, I replied; these boots are for the hard floors 
of the London galleries. ... I once dealt with music 
and pictures together in the spare time of an active revo- 
lutionist, and wrote plays and books and other toil- 
some things into the bargain." As critic, in short, he 
"enjoyed the immunities of impecuniosity with the op- 
portunities of a millionaire." Note, too, this line or so 
on critics and criticism : " Democracy has now handed 
the sceptre of the despot to the sovereign people; but 
they too must have their confessor whom they call Critic. 
Criticism is not only medicinally salutary ; it has positive 
popular attractions in its cruelty, its gladiatorship, and 
the gratification its attacks on the great give to envy, 
and its praises to enthusiasm." 

It is just because this great American democracy is 
trying to do without criticism, that its literature is in 
such parlous state, and that this book is written. Not 



CRITICISM 401 

one of those critical qualities which Shaw held to be 
" medicinally salutary " has in recent recollection been 
allowed to disturb our present commercialism. 

Contrast, if you please, Shaw's " opportunities of a 
millionaire " with Walter Harte's " I am the poor, re- 
bellious pawn of my stomach. . . ." There is the 
gulf between the Irishman who succeeded and the Ameri- 
can who failed. And that gulf springs more from the 
difference in national taste than in the individuals. 

Eventually, as he humorously pretended, Shaw foresaw 
the failing of his critical powers. He began to repeat 
himself, and to fall into a style which, to his great peril, 
was recognised as at least partly serious. As conscious- 
ness of this came to him, he saw but one thing left; re- 
hash his critical work for book publication he would not 
(though he did, in later years), but he would publish 
his plays. It was not my intention to consider the 
fortunes of those plays, on the stage and off; all that 
history is too obviously familiar. But, in the prefaces 
he published with those several volumes, he continued to 
be, directly as well as indirectly, a most entertaining 
critic, and from that side he aids our argument here. 
Always, immitigably, he has been a critic; whether he 
called a book of his by this or that play-title, it was still 
merely an essay in dialogue form prefaced by an essay 
in monologue form. 

In all his directly critical work and his Prefaces you 
may depend upon finding enough material to give a vivid 
notion of the critic's personality and achievements, and a 
deal of illumination upon art in general, and the state 
of the English drama in particular. 

Quite aside from the noise his plays caused in print 
and performance (not only in England and America but 
on the European continent), their publication between 
covers marked an improvement in the literary aspect of 
the English-speaking drama. Mr. George Moore, an- 



402 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

other Irishman, whom I also prefer to consider greater 
in criticism than in any other artistic medium, had writ- 
ten, in an essay published between covers in 1891, that 
the playwrights of his time and tongue were but " third, 
fourth and fifth-rate men of letters." He instanced 
Burnand, G. R. Sims, W. G. Wills, Henry Arthur Jones, 
S. Grundy, A. W. Pinero, and Robert Buchanan. Mr. 
Buchanan, in Moore's opinion, was then the " most dis- 
tinguished man of letters the stage can boast of, and 
Mr. Robert Buchanan is a minor poet and a tenth-rate 
novelist." Mr. Shaw made it impossible for Mr. Moore, 
or for another, to repeat that accusation. 

It is impossible to escape the parallel between those 
two Irishmen, Shaw and Moore, just as between Wilde's 
paradox and Shaw's the comparison is also inevitable. 
Though in doing so we forestall somewhat the definite 
critical consideration of George Moore's achievements as 
a man of letters, which is to have, presently, a chapter 
of its own, it may pertinently be observed, here and now, 
that Moore has written and adventured much as Shaw 
did. His experiences with Free theatres, in France, in 
England, and in Ireland, gave him text for many amus- 
ing essays. Fine novelist as we must regard him, I like 
him best as the critical controversialist. Whether it was 
the pose of seeking out the adventures of other souls in 
art, as in " The Confessions of a Young Man," or the 
later poses of forsaking England for Ireland, and vice 
versa, his critical writings were always worth attention. 
Barring the Shaw prefaces, few are so amusing as that 
of this other Irishman to his play " The Bending of the 
Bough," or his Apology for the American edition of 
" Memoirs of My Dead Life." 

" The Bending of the Bough " was but a poor thing ; 
but the preface was quite in the fine frenzy of a wild 
Irishman. The points whereat these two Irishmen touch 
are innumerable. Like Mr. Shaw, Moore had no scruples 
about altering his opinions. Once, for instance, Mr. 



CRITICISM 403 

Moore believed there were at least a thousand Londoners 
willing to subscribe to the support of an independent 
theatre; ten or eleven years later he informed us that 
there was no art in all England, that he was for turning 
his back on London, and trying Dublin. A little later, 
he crossed the Irish Channel again. . . . Ah, these 
knights errant of pen and pencil and mask, what would 
we have done without them ? Whistler vowed he would 
never live in Paris again ; then he took the same oath 
against England; Mr. Mansfield refused to act, prefer- 
ring the career of a critic ; next he eschewed curtain 
speeches, and lectured to colleges ; oh, it was a mad 
world, indeed, yet take out the Dandies and the Irish- 
men — and not for many pages have we mentioned any 
others — and it would be but a grey and gloomy place. 

While no play of Mr. Shaw's failed, as did Mr. Moore's 
" The Bending of the Bough " and " The Strike at Ar- 
lingford," the latter writer is the greater novelist. The 
musical temperament, however, is as keenly limned in 
" Love Among the Artists " as in " Evelyn Innes." In 
criticism the honors are about even ; both have written of 
books, of music, of painting, as well as of the drama ; in 
all, from their pens, there was originality of view and 
fearlessness of expression. Much as the two have in 
common, however, — their tiltings at the British philis- 
tine, their lashings of the theatre, its management and 
its public — in the essential of humor they are the world 
apart. Mr. Moore sometimes seems to have no humor 
at all; of the Celtic character he has retained only the 
melancholy. Of the lightning-like vision of Shaw, whose 
paradox is as vivid as his logic is comprehensive, Mr. 
Moore is devoid. Yet how much these minds have in 
common was emphasised in Shaw's Preface to his " Plays 
for Puritans." 

Mr. Shaw opened that particular essay by a witty 
account of the mental and physical collapse into which 
four years' activity as a critic of the London theatre 



404 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

had thrown him; and proceeded to take up the story of 
the English theatre in general, its conditions and its 
chances. Summing up, we may find some slight differ- 
ences of opinion on the subject of British taste between 
Shaw and Moore. Shaw held that the Englishman does 
not know how to play; he wishes the theatre to be only 
a place of excitement or amusement; the majority of 
playgoers having " neither the philosopher's impatience 
to get to realities (reality being the one thing they want 
to escape from) nor the longing of the sportsman for 
violent action." Against that you may put a passage 
from Moore, wherein he declared that it is to dramatic 
writing that we must look to discover the depths to which 
an art can sink " when it is written and produced at the 
mutual dictation of the gallery god, who for a shilling 
demands oblivion of his day's work, and the stockbroker 
who for 10s. 6d. demands such amusements as will enable 
him safely to digest his dinner." But the doctors differ 
in their conclusions : Moore's was the notion to " liberate 
the theatre from the thraldom of money is the truly 
great adventure which awaits the rich man " ; while Shaw 
merely regretted that " the substitution of sensuous ec- 
stasy for intellectual activity and honesty is the very 
devil." 

Shaw was content to expose causes and conditions, and 
indicate his own attitude. When he saw our age " crown- 
ing the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love " he 
revolted. There Moore was with him. He had written: 
" It would have been better if the Puritan had applied 
himself to the redemption of the theatre, for in aban- 
doning it to the taste of the licentious mob he aggra- 
vated the evil, and now the Puritan joins hands with the 
artist in condemning the theatre. . . . They both 
wish art to be serious, and the arguments for and against 
the theatre are held by the artist and the Puritan; the 
public seeks merely to be amused." 

There is hardly an end to the contrasts and parallels 



CRITICISM 405 

to be found for that Preface of Shaw's for his " Plays 
for Puritans." Recall that famous passage in Wilde's 
" Intentions " on nature imitating art, and then note 
Shaw's version of the effect of maudlin theatricals : " The 
worst of it is, that since man's intellectual consciousness 
of himself is derived from the descriptions of himself in 
books, a persistent misrepresentation of humanity in 
literature finally gets accepted and acted upon. . . . 
I have noticed that when a certain type of feature ap- 
pears in painting and is admired as beautiful, it pres- 
ently becomes common in nature." Between the Irish- 
men who so differently set forth this same notion there 
was only a decade or so. Shaw's conclusion to his argu- 
ment that stage morals may corrupt actual morals was 
in his assertion that " ten years of cheap reading have 
changed the English from the most stolid nation in Eu- 
rope to the most theatrical and hysterical." At about 
that same time, it is true, Mr. Max Beerbohm was still 
using his belief in the stolidity of the English temper 
to explain the fact that there were no good English- 
speaking actors in the world; an explanation which Am- 
brose Bierce had used many years ago for the same phe- 
nomenon. 

But — how many edges are taken from delight by a 
too retentive memory! Whether Mr. Shaw went with 
or counter to Wilde or Moore; or whether Beerbohm re- 
peated Bierce; this is all of little moment save as prov- 
ing that in the originality of all clear critical minds 
there is kinship. 

That same Walter Harte, whom America allowed to 
perish because he was a critic and not a licker of boots, 
is the only American who accurately forecast such egois- 
tic criticism as Shaw gave us. Note this passage, from 
the preface " On Diabolonian Ethics," in which Shaw de- 
fended his egoism : " The reason most dramatists do not 
publish their plays with prefaces is that they cannot 



406 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

write them, the business of intellectually conscious philos- 
opher and skilled critic being no part of the playwright's 
craft. Now, what I say is, why should I get another 
man to praise me when I can praise myself? I have no 
disabilities to plead; produce me your best critic, and I 
will criticise his head off. ... I leave the delicacies 
of retirement to those who are gentlemen first and literary 
workmen afterwards. ... I have advertised myself 
so well that I find myself, whilst still in middle life, 
almost as legendary aJ\ person as the Flying Dutch- 
man." 

Which, however ashamed it should make all the press- 
agencies of our time, was literally true. The secret, to 
be sure, was that Shaw really had something to adver- 
tise. Against the fine candor in that passage, put this, 
by Moore: "We all want notoriety, our desire for no- 
toriety is hideous, if you will, but it is less hideous when 
it is proclaimed from a brazen tongue than when it hides 
its head in the cant of human humanitarianism. Hu- 
manity be hanged! Self, and after self a friend; the 
rest may go to the devil ! " the first of which has my full 
approval, as declaring Bernard Shaw more admirable 
than Hall Caine ; but the latter phrases I mislike, as 
smacking somewhat too grossly of the Tammany code in 
politics. But is it not curious how the Socialist, Bernard 
Shaw, and the temporary pagan, George Moore, get to 
the identical text? 

What was most charming in that preface " On Diabo- 
lonian Ethics " had been antedated by Walter Harte early 
in the year 1896 in a paper which, indeed, surely put 
finger on the secret of that charm. Mr. Harte pointed 
out, what those who too much admired and too much 
despised Shaw had altogether forgotten, that " Heine, 
who wrote with so much charm about himself, and could 
scarcely have found a more interesting subject 
was of the opinion that . . . autobiography is the 
most irresistible form of literature." Mr. Harte went on 



CRITICISM 407 

to propose the introduction of the brief critical autobi- 
ography, — just the sort of literature, in other words, that 
Mr. Shaw later gave us. " In this we may get much 
good literature," said Mr. Harte, " for the dullest man 
is at his best when writing about himself. A man can 
then be independent, and still be heralded in print as one 
of the potent forces and geniuses of his day." (The 
italics are mine.) 

If that does not sound like prophecy, what does? It 
is a pity its author could not have practised his theory 
as successfully as did our Irishman. But the conditions 
here, as I have written this book to maintain, have con- 
tinuously forbidden just such a career as Bernard Shaw's 
in America. 

What, in America, have we had of such candidly egois- 
tic criticism — criticism that explains the critic as much 
as the subject? Mr. Vance Thompson, it is true, in some 
of his quicksilvery enthusiasms for the exotic, displayed 
a passion in impressionistic criticism which had plenty of 
ego in it ; but it might have impressed more forcibly if 
he had not himself once vowed that he was " sick of the 
fluent impressionism of Lemaitre and George Bernard 
Shaw." At that moment he was writing about Ernest 
La Jeunesse, the Frenchman whose subtly imitative 
method of criticism Mr. Thompson himself did so much 
to further in English. " Fluent impressionism " was ex- 
actly what he himself dealt in, when he was discussing 
for our illumination the writers of young France; and, 
as between two methods of exposing an ego, justice shows 
that Mr. Thompson discovered always as much pose as 
personality. 

If it must be pose, too, there is always the Max Beer- 
bohm pose; behind that, as behind his paradox, there is 
much sane philosophy, as was proven by the years which 
followed his first public posturing in prose and carica- 
ture. It is to him, indeed, that we are indebted for a 



408 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

most entertaining caricature, in black and white, of Mr. 
Shaw, whereby, even if he had not himself given us much 
other criticism containing true creation, the historian of 
this period must take note of him. 

As between two different methods in log-rolling, is 
there anything to choose between Shaw's and that in 
vogue here? Why not — instead of the insufferable ad- 
vertisements telling fairy-tales in guise of statistics anent 
the newest " best sellers " ; instead of the saccharine 
phrase-mongering of the panderers paid to pimp for pub- 
lishers' advertisements ; instead of the sedulous activities 
of the bureaus furnishing personal paragraphs about the 
public and private affairs of our authors ; — why not the 
frank self-glorification of a G. B. S.? One thing is 
sure: the intellectual appeal in such advertising would 
go up notably. Remembering what Heine and Walter 
Harte said, and what Shaw so clearly proved, authors 
would doubtless write far more readably about themselves 
than they now do about one another. 

Perhaps — says sophistication — more authors do that 
very thing than we imagine ? True ; — perhaps — but they 
do not sign such stuff. It is the signature that gives it 
value and humor. 

Is there a Don Quixote to step into this breach? Let 
him not be abashed by what those fine swashbuckling 
Irishmen, Wilde and Shaw and Moore — (if you mislike 
the phrase for Wilde, remember the swashbuckler could 
use rapier as well as broadsword!) — have done; the Amer- 
ican field is quite virgin for candor; let him take heart; 
he will have no competition on this side the Atlantic! 
The wilderness of hypocrisy is so dense that the ques- 
tion is whether any ever so doughty egoist could ever 
blaze a path through. Certainly the combination of 
Truth and Ego has seldom been tried in America; it 
killed Walter Harte. Not one of those careers in Eng- 
land and the European continent that we are now con- 



CRITICISM 409 

sidering would have been attended, in America, with any- 
thing save disenchantment. 

In a moment of madness one might, perhaps, throw 
discretion to the winds ; begin to tell, without reserve, the 
story of one's life. . . . But, no ; the case of Harte 
comes too readily to mind ; let us beware of too pre- 
mature a death ; our literature and our publishers have 
surely victims enough. 

Besides — there is an insuperable objection: I am no 
Irishman. So dies the dream of being another D'Ar- 
tagnan. 

So far I had written in 1901. 

How far the world has come, since then, in apprecia- 
tion of G. B. S. is notorious enough. 

Only upon his being essentially a critic, whatever art- 
form he may choose, would I still lay stress. Always he 
had socialist criticisms on life or letters to make. 
Whether in " Mrs. Warren's Profession " or " Widowers' 
Houses " he tilted at the hypocrisies in our civilisation, 
or in other plays analysed the Irish character, in yet 
others posed the problem of " tainted money " — nothing 
he wrote was ever anything but criticism. Always he 
was reading Society a lecture, giving our consciences a 
shock. While our newspapers were revelling in inartistic 
journalese, or our novelists writing " muck-raking " 
novels, about this or that plutocratic crime, Shaw was 
writing entertaining plays that brought the problems out 
far more clearly, and entertained our intelligence into 
the bargain. What Ouida said years ago, Shaw re- 
peated, when he declared, in " Major Barbara," that " the 
State is constantly forcing the consciences of men by 
violence and cruelty." Is there grotesque laughter at 
coupling of Ouida and Shaw? Read, then, the shorter 
Italian tales of Ouida; read, therewith, the serio-comic 
sermons on life which Shaw put in terms of the theatre, 
and if you do not see that Mile, de la Ramee and our 



410 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Irishman were, to use a phrase of his own, fellow-" con- 
noisseurs in irony," it will be because your sight is ob- 
scured by your prejudices. 

Shaw's sight, as we have already seen, was never ob- 
scured. It is interesting to recur to that, since it brings 
up a curious parallel between him and that other idol- 
smasher whose impress on our thought has been so strong: 
Friederich Nietzsche. 

Shaw told this of a visit to his oculist: 

" He tested my eyesight one evening, and informed me 
that it was quite interesting to him because it was ' normal.' 
I naturally took this to mean that it was like everybody 
else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and 
hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and 
highly fortunate person optically, normal sight conferring 
the power of seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by 
only about ten per cent, of the population, the remaining 
ninety per cent, being abnormal." 

Compare that with the following revelation made about 
Nietzsche by Henry L. Mencken: 

" As a matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision 
and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof 
from his fellows." 

So, with both these men, their individual clearness of 
sight, mental as well as physical, distinguished them from 
their fellows, and marked them as targets for the sus- 
picion of the average intelligence. Only a magnificent 
physique and an unquenchable Celtic humor enabled 
Shaw to conquer the allied stupidities of the Anglo-Saxon 
world; lacking both the physique and the humor, Nietz- 
sche succumbed as to his body ; but his terrific philos- 
ophy, flung like a comet into interstellar spaces, shines 
on eternally. Its influence permeates thought in the 
twentieth century; call it original or not, it is there. 
Consciously or unconsciously he voiced that triumph of 



CRITICISM 411 

analysis and of the individual which elsewhere such men 
as G. B. Shaw, and W. S. Gilbert — differing from him 
only in the possession of humor — had put into plays and 
stories. Nietzsche found German philosophy based on 
formula, precedent and convention. False premises, rot- 
ten statutes, and outworn creeds were everywhere. He 
saw that an axe would have to be laid to the root of 
it all. So, with his wonderful courage, his keen analysis 
and his fascinating style, he began that warfare which 
kept him busy for the rest of his short life — that fight 
to prove that good and evil were relative terms, and that 
no human being had any right to judge or direct the 
actions of another. 

How closely acceptance follows new thinking you may 
see if you compare with that general thesis of Nietzsche 
the countless so-called epigrams made within recent years 
on the text that Morals are entirely a matter of Geog- 
raphy. If, off-hand, you had been told that such cyni- 
cisms — such plain phrasing of clear seeing — whether ac- 
credited to a Talleyrand, a Swift or an Oscar Wilde — 
were nothing but Nietzsche in solution, you would have 
doubtless been surprised. But the evidence is there. More 
than that, if you would see how close may run the 
phrases of a Gilbert and a German philosopher, the epi- 
grams of an Irishman and the axioms of a sham-smashing 
Teuton, you have only to observe the following parallel. 
The theory of it is entirely my own ; I stand ready to 
be refuted, but I do not believe any other writer has 
pointed it out. 

Namely, the affinity between Nietzsche and Gilbert. 

Gilbert, W. S. Gilbert, the author of the only English 
librettos that are also literature? You say you do not 
see the connection? Well, let us see. There was at least 
a decade or two, was there not, when Gilbertian phrases 
were as current among us as are now the newest atroc- 
ities in slang? You grant that? Very well. Now, 
Nietzsche having been dead some years, it is presumable 



412 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

that even the most flippantly minded Americans have 
passed beyond the stage when they supposed his name 
stood for a sort of influenza ; indeed, they cannot well 
have escaped the knowledge that the word Superman, 
popularised by a play of Shaw's, is of Nietzsche origin. 
What is the notion of a Superman (an Uebermensch) , or 
of what is implied in the title of his first important philo- 
sophic work, " Menschliches Allzu Menschliches," but the 
identical idea which Gilbert put into his caustic lines 
touching the " too too utterly " ? 

From the libretto of " Patience " (that opera which 
set to music the esthetic craze of Wilde) to the philos- 
ophy of Nietzsche may seem a far cry, but it is entirely 
my own ; I make it in reaffirming a phenomenon which 
has marked all ages : the spontaneous growth of great 
ideas in great men showing everywhere at identical pe- 
riods, though many miles and all possible barriers of 
language intervene. 

Independence of thought, in all ages, has marked, has 
made, or has destroyed the great man. Time was when 
we smiled at all implied in the " too too utter " ; to-day 
we talk of the Superman. Gilbert-Nietzsche; Nietzsche- 
Gilbert : there is the pendulum of ideas. 

Of Shaw the dramatic critic the general reading public 
was finally made aware by two volumes of his " Dramatic 
Opinions and Essays," to which reference has already 
been made. You have been told how he vowed he never 
would rehash his journalistic feats, and then, after all, 
allowed it to be done. The world at large doubtless for 
the first time realised the critic in him when it saw these 
books ; to the discriminating nothing from his pen was 
ever anything else than criticism. 

These volumes of dramatic opinions of his (which 
might easily be equaled by books of his on music and 
painting) were equally valuable as a Guide to Shaw and 
to the theatrical period they covered. If we had not in 



CRITICISM 413 

the many familiar Prefaces gained our impression of this 
author, and of his sufferings on the hard floors of the 
picture galleries, the foul air and false art of the thea- 
tre, we would have gained them vividly enough in that 
printed picture of Shaw the Dramatic Critic of the late 
'Nineties. On the three years of the English theatre be- 
tween 1895 and 1898 these pages threw such bright illu- 
mination that the light fell actually upon the whole art 
of English drama during the last decade of the nine- 
teenth century. 

In this memorably fine personal chronicle of an Eng- 
lish dramatic period so many details were notable that 
I cannot possibly point out anything save what helps 
the main argument in my book. Still, I must interpolate 
here that all those Shaw pages on " Borkmann " and 
on Echegaray affected me with ironic poignancy, since — 
as you may remember — I was of those who, ten years 
ago, striking twelve an hour before noon, first intro- 
duced to New York, by way of the Criterion Independent 
Theatre, both the Ibsen play and " El Gran Galeoto." 
Also, you should note that Shaw did not expect anyone 
to be wise enough to produce " Peer G-ynt " in English 
before 1920; Mr. Mansfield, by advancing that event 
fourteen years, unintentionally repaid some of his debt, 
as actor, to Mr. Shaw as artist. 

" A literary play," Shaw remarked, " is a play that 
the actors have to act; in opposition to the acting play, 
which acts them." That is but one specimen of the 
common-sense which this critic constantly used for our 
illumination and for the discomfiture of the incompetent 
in art. The frequence and vigor of his denunciations 
of the manner in which our modern players pretend to 
master in a season the art of the stage — which Talma 
declared to be a matter of at least twenty years — has 
been equaled on his own side of the water only by George 
Moore, and on our side only by Charles Frederic Nird- 
linger. 



414. THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Shaw, as critic, gave one of the sanest verdicts upon 
Wilde that you may find anywhere. He characterised 
him, in that period of the 'Nineties, as, in a certain sense, 
England's " only playwright. He plays with every- 
thing: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors 
and audience, with the whole theatre." A summing up 
which we can apply as logically to G. B. S. himself; he 
has played his game quite as fantastically as the other 
Irishman ; you have only to recall " Arms and the Man " 
to see how deliberately he made fun of his public over 
the footlights. 

When Shaw comes to enunciation of his conception of 
the critic's province he is so completely in accord with 
what I have insisted on often enough for literature, that 
in sheer glee I cannot refrain from quotation. " It is 
the business of the dramatic critic to educate the dunces, 
not to echo them," he declared, which I hold to be even 
more necessary in my own art. Again, " The artist's 
rule must be Cromwell's : Not what they want, but what 
is good for them." I commend these various formulas 
to our professors whose spines are well-oiled for usher- 
ing in the countless incompetents. " A dramatic critic 
is really the servant of a high art, and not a mere 
advertiser of entertainments of questionable respectabil- 
ity of motive." There, again, you may elide the word 
" dramatic " and hold the sentence true. " The actor 
who desires enduring fame must seek it at the hands of 
the critic, and not of the casual playgoer," is a thought 
which, translated to apply to literature, holds equally 
good. And finally this, applicable most surely to all 
the arts : 

" As the respect inspired by a good criticism is permanent, 
whilst the irritation it causes is temporary, and as, on the 
other hand, the pleasure given by a venial criticism is tempo- 
rary and the contempt it inspires permanent, no man really 



CRITICISM 415 

secures his advancement as a dramatist by making himself 
despised as a critic." 

I wonder if the average American critic really knows 
what that sentence means? 

The true test of criticism, from any sane viewpoint, 
is whether, after the duty to the subject has been ful- 
filled, it is as fascinating to the uninitiated as to the dev- 
otee of the art in question. Shaw's criticism always stood 
that test. Everything he did, whether in lecture, or 
play, or story, or essay, was always criticism ; and noth- 
ing that he did, in whatever disguise, but was full of 
fascination, not only upon men of letters and habitual 
playgoers, but on those who intrinsically cared for no 
art save that of being entertained. 

Infinitely amusing, unflaggingly sane, was Bernard 
Shaw. But whom can we name in any of the arts to 
equal him on this side of the water? Where shall we 
find an American equivalent to this clear flashing of 
Irish wit and criticism? 

Quite aside from our Irish trio, Wilde, Shaw and 
Moore, what critic of the theatre has New York had in 
our time to compare, for general worth and general ap- 
preciation, to that of William Archer, A. B. Walkley, 
J. T. Greive, and G. S. Street? Does London, do you 
think, know the name of more than, say, one serious 
American critic of the drama? 

Say what you please about criticism — call it as often 
as you like the lament of impotent aspiration — the fact 
remains that only through the vigor of its criticism may 
you discern the health of an art. American dramatic 
criticism has been as lamentably lacking as criticism of 
literature. There was Mr. Laurence Hutton, who prat- 
tled about the death-masks of famous players ; and there 
was Mr. William Winter, who, to be sure, could write as 



416 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

robustly as any Shaw or Moore at rare intervals in the 
New York Tribune, but whose books upon the theatre 
were nothing but a welter of weeping. I know but two 
American writers who have attempted real literature in 
criticism in the domain of the theatre: James Huneker 
and Charles Frederic Nirdlinger. 

If in many directions Mr. Shaw and Mr. Huneker kept 
parallel — (both have been critics of music, of the drama, 
and of painting) — the published books of Mr. Huneker 
deal with the foreign drama more than with our own. 
Moreover, aside from the remarkable manner in which 
Mr. Huneker has patterned his critical career upon the 
versatile method of Shaw, it is as a musical critic that 
I prefer to introduce him, so that I must delay his case 
until George Moore has been touched upon. 

That leaves us, then, one single critic of the drama, 
Charles Frederic Nirdlinger. Between Shaw's " Dra- 
matic Opinions " and Mr. Nirdlinger's " Masques and 
Mummers " there was the practical similarity that both 
definitely covered certain periods in the theatre of Eng- 
land and America. Since no other American critic of 
this calibre has become equally conspicuous, Mr. Nird- 
linger's single volume is all that we have in candid and 
memorable discussion upon the drama in America at the 
end of the last century. As that drama was largely 
English, you see how the books touch at many points. 
Upon the contrasting merits of Bernhardt and Duse we 
have Mr. Nirdlinger's fine chapter on " Signora's Art 
and Madam's Antics," while Shaw wrote upon the heels 
of Bernhardt's antics : " I shall certainly not treat her 
as a dramatic artist of the first rank unless she pays me 
well for it." Vastly at odds as were the styles of Mr. 
Nirdlinger and Mr. Shaw — the former writing with a 
classic formality denoting the early Greek scholar and 
occasionally straining for the strange word, while the 
latter kept us agape at his colloquial candor, his impu- 
dent recklessness in thought and expression — in orig- 



CRITICISM 417 

inality, in serious desire for reform and freedom from 
conventions, these two critics bore each other appreci- 
able resemblance. As Shaw had declared that in an ex- 
hibition of clothes worn by popular actors he would 
undertake to point out at sight the individual for which 
each sartorial expression stood, so did Mr. Nirdlinger 
once propound the pleasant theory that the actors really 
need never be named on the programme ! 

Slight as is that one volume of Mr. Nirdlinger's, it is 
all we have to contrast against the wealth of foreign 
criticism on the theatre. Therein the literature of the 
American stage received its first really vigorous and un- 
compromising contribution in criticism. " Masques and 
Mummers " was full of sturdy opinions, always forcibly, 
often persuasively, and even beautifully expressed. In 
this criticism of the theatre there was nothing of those 
qualities so dominant all about us : the pandering to 
players with whom the critic has supped, or being easy 
with managers of whom as playwright he had hopes. In 
fact — what with the general barrenness of the field to- 
day; what with the critics of the Nym Crinkle period 
never having cared to let even their least venal light 
shine for posterity; and with Mr. Winter having 
preferred to save for " covers " only the most harm- 
less specimens of his often robust and brilliant criticism 
■ — -Mr. Nirdlinger is to be hailed as having first raised 
dramatic criticism in America to the level of permanent 
literature. 

While it was by way of Shaw that we came to observ- 
ance of Mr. Nirdlinger as critic, we cannot, since the 
latter himself calls attention to the book, avoid noting 
how much there is in common between George Moore's 
famous essay on " Mummer Worship " and the author of 
" Masques and Mummers." The American, though no 
less forceful and brave than Moore in his opinions, dis- 
played a more Attic elegance of language, and a wider 



418 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

sweep of strictly theatric experience. Yet the main end 
in all his critical work was to prove that the literary 
and not the mechanical side of drama is what counts. 
The play, and not the player, is considerable; that is 
the text of this book. It was not, in fine, a book to 
please what is known as the Rialto in New York. The 
scholar, the man about town, the person of taste in every 
walk of life, could not escape the charm in these critical 
pages ; but not the actor. For the pivot on which Mr. 
Nirdlinger's whole scheme of criticism turned, the hook 
on which he hung philippic after philippic against the 
prevailing drama and criticism in the American theatre, 
is revealed in this: 

" The performance of a playwright is the product of in- 
telligence, presumably; the performance of an actor is noth- 
ing of the sort, necessarily. Playmaking is an art; acting 
merely an accident. The man qualified to make a play of any 
considerable merit is generally a person of sufficient mental 
training, moral calm and esthetic impersonality to compre- 
hend the purpose of criticism and appreciate its spirit. Not 
so the actor, whose calling requires an egotism, vanity and 
temperamental immodesty that construe analysis into a per- 
sonal insult. Finally, too, the playwright is capable of profit- 
ing by the lessons and intimations of his censors. But the 
actor . . ." 

The student of style should find satisfaction in Mr. 
Nirdlinger's pages, inasmuch as his writing is unmistak- 
ably that of one on whom Latin and Greek have left 
their mark. The result is often a preciosity to delight 
the intelligent while confounding the untutored. Of cer- 
tain somewhat cryptic syllables, it is true, this critic was 
a trifle overenamored ; such words as " trope," " ambi- 
ency " and " pudicity " occur with remarkable " fre- 
quence " ; but even such details as these go to the making 
of that rare bird, a stylist. Certainly, slight as the pub- 



CRITICISM 419 

lished volume of his critical work, Mr. Nirdlinger has de- 
served well of the American drama and its literature. He 
was a real critic, in a land where you must search for 
them harder than Diogenes. 

Yet, quite aside from the slight volume of critical writ- 
ing by a Nirdlinger as against the considerable volume 
our trio of Irishmen gave us in the same period, if you 
will compare his position, his renown, against theirs, you 
will see the force of my argument that American criticism 
is but a puny plant on ungrateful soil. 

Who, among the multitudes reading only newspapers, 
ever heard of Mr. Nirdlinger the critic? They heard 
once of Clement Scott, perhaps ; they may have heard 
of Mr. William Archer and his views on Ibsen ; or they 
may recall that Mr. A. B. Walkley was once refused 
entrance to a London theatre by an actor. But an Amer- 
ican critic of that rank — no ; the only criticism they know 
is that used on the billboards. 

Coming lower in the scale of comparison, admitting 
that the fame of Wilde, and Shaw and Moore far over- 
tops anything possible to a critic on this side of the 
Atlantic, compare the case of the better sort of Amer- 
ican dramatic critic with that of Mr. Walkley, whom, 
through the publication of his " Drama and Life," we 
may consider from the literary viewpoint. Mr. Walkley 
was no cleverer, no honester; but his position as critic of 
the London Times, his standing in the intellectual commu- 
nity, was of actual importance, while his American com- 
peer was held merely to be rather a dangerous eccentric. 
Mr. Walkley was nothing wonderful ; yet the sum total of 
his attitude was so intelligent, so cosmopolitan, that 
against our American average it loomed as the expression 
of a gentleman and a scholar. He maintained a decent 
mean between brilliance and seriousness. He indulged 
in much comparison between the French and the English 



420 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

theatre; devoted many pages to Shaw; a chapter to the 
Irish National Theatre; and two to the dancing of Ade- 
line Genee. When Mr. Walkley forecast the day when 
drama will vanish since " exact knowledge of reality " 
will have made acting impossible, he had in mind the 
same fundamental thought which brought Mr. Nirdlinger 
to argue for the anonymity of actors. 

In Mr. Walkley, too, we could trace that Nietzsche 
influence so evident in Shaw. But differently expressed. 
What Walkley transformed to his own use was the doc- 
trine that players never arrive at the actual spirit, never 
grasp more than slightly the real soul, of the figures 
they portray; that they never penetrate beyond exte- 
riors. It was on that same theory, unconscious of Nietz- 
sche, that the satire in " The Imitator " was based ; and 
how little even a genius of drama may help in solving 
that problem of personality you will have seen in my 
pages upon Mr. Richard Mansfield. 

What was Nietzsche, indeed, but the Machiavelli of 
our time? Machiavelli, like those others, Nietzsche and 
G. B. S., saw things normally, as they were; he did not 
confuse his vision with notions as to how things ought 
to be. 

To Mr. Walkley's castigation of Pinero for his " dic- 
tionary English " I have already referred in an earlier 
chapter. 

Here, then, is my point : taking merely an average case 
of critical intelligence — as Mr. Walkley's — in England, 
you still find a more acknowledged and powerful success 
than if you take the most distinguished example America 
can produce. 

What, against the trio I have chosen to do battle for 
criticism abroad, is one such as Charles Frederic Nird- 



CRITICISM 421 

linger? Whatever he may count in originality, in hon- 
esty and in style — in the scale of commercialism, omnip- 
otent to-day, he counts as an almost negligible instance. 

Which, surely, is something we could say nor of Wilde, 
nor of Shaw, nor of George Moore. 

The last-named writer remains to be considered. 



CHAPTER TEN 

From the time when the critical impertinence in " The 
Confessions of a Young Man " first astonished the Eng- 
lish-speaking world George Moore has been one of the 
most interesting figures in the world of art. He has 
varied his formulas, changed his artistic medium; he has 
written autobiographically and critically as well as in 
the play and narrative forms ; but to me he has always 
been paramount as critic. In his novels he has criticised 
life and paint and music ; in his other books he threw 
illumination on those same subjects, and on his own ar- 
tistic self as well. However swiftly and briefly we review 
Mr. Moore's career we must, I think, emerge always with 
our view of him as critic strengthened. There were a 
number of early novels of his full of Zola and a sort of 
sensationalism but slightly redeemed by their bravado ; 
in books of criticism more serious than the " Confes- 
sions " he made all the art-loving world, conscious enough 
now of Whistler and Manet and Degas, his debtors, and 
enraged all the actors by his views on " Mummer Wor- 
ship " ; he wrote militantly for Independent Theatres ; 
he devoted himself and some fiction to his native Irish 
country and character and language ; he wrote novels 
which many regard as the finest serious fiction in Eng- 
lish which modern music has stimulated; and he contin- 
ued, after a twenty years' interval, those confessions of 
self which he had contributed to the general entertain- 
ment in the 'Eighties. 

Never, for one moment of his many fine artistic achieve- 
ments, was he greater than as a critic of the arts. You 
may include in that, if you like, the art of life; for he 
never saw life save through the eye of the immitigable 
artist. 



CRITICISM 423 

Never has the melancholy Irish soul had more perfect 
expression than in George Moore. The Irishman's wit, 
his quality of sprite or elf, we found in Shaw, and in 
Wilde; not in Moore. The Celtic quicksilver was in all 
three. To put it in terms simply human : as long as 
you did not depend on them, all was well enough. To- 
day they laughed; to-morrow cried. One day Wilde 
sneered at sincerity ; the next, in prison, he preached a 
sermon on Christ that no minister of the gospel ever 
surpassed for beauty. One day Moore denounced the 
Christian influence on the world; the next he was writing 
novels which for description of Catholicism in England 
and Ireland are supreme in their kind. 

Yes — the melancholy Irish soul. 

Do you know the portrait of Moore by Walter 
Sickert? You will see, there, that melancholy, the same 
melancholy, I think, that was in the face of Walter 
Pater, who was Dutch rather than Celt. 

But it was not melancholy that stared at you boldly 
from the pages of the " Confessions of a Young Man," 
the pages which introduced Moore to this generation. It 
was impertinence, impressionism, paganism, Celto-Gallic 
frankness, a number of things foreign and refreshing to 
our Anglo-Saxon artistic respectabilities ; but it was not 
melancholy. Who, that is worth his salt in the literary 
vineyard to-day, but recalls delightedly that first suc- 
cumbing to the impudent, alluring charm of that book? 

What clearer argument need there be for the advan- 
tages of personality and prejudice in criticism than the 
survival of this early crime of Moore's youth? Where, 
now, are the many burrowings into academic formulas 
which saw the light, as books, at that same period? 

With the " Confessions " Moore definitely began that 
career in which he now looms so fine a figure; he became 
a Man of Letters. It is in that book we may find the 
germs of all that he has since given us: his interest in 



424 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

paint, in fiction, in music and in the theatre was first 
formally exposed in that volume, with the swagger of 
youth, but also with the fascination of an artist whom 
even a style rotten with French idiom could but slightly 
hamper. What was hinted in that book he later ex- 
panded in plays and criticisms and stories ; to measure 
that first impertinent but appealing bit of literature now, 
in any solemn serious way, is as if we judged a play by 
the " synopsis " printed on the programme. Yet one of 
those apparent impertinences was, I remember, recalled 
to me by something Ambrose Bierce wrote very soberly 
ten years later; and, if only to show that behind the 
impertinences of George Moore — as behind the paradox 
of Wilde or of Max Beerbohm — there was often sound 
philosophy, the incident is of value. 

Inveighing against education Moore had written : 

" A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing 
of politics, must be very nearly happy; — and to think there 
are people who would educate, who would draw these people 
out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them 
passions ! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times." 

Against that, put this, written by Ambrose Bierce in 
February, 1897, some ten years later: 

" The only man that labors with a song in his heart is he 
that knows nothing but to labor. Give him education — en- 
large by ever so little the scope of his thought — make him 
accessible to a sense of the pleasures of life and his own 
privations, and you set up a quarrel between him and his 
condition. . . ." 

I have always thought the essay from which that is 
quoted should be printed separately, in pamphlet form, 
in sufficient numbers so that one might be posted daily 
to Mr. Carnegie for the term of his natural life. . . . 
For Mr. Carnegie is most militant in that campaign, to 



CRITICISM 425 

compel our literary uplifting, which has as war-cry the 
one word " More ! " indefinitely repeated. 

What Mr. Moore had promised in criticism of the arts 
through his " Confessions " he memorably kept in those 
two volumes, still the best in their sort that our period 
has produced, " Modern Painting " and " Impressions 
and Opinions." In the latter appeared much about the 
theatre (including the essay on Mummer-Worship) ; some 
literature (in which first we realised Mr. Moore's devo- 
tion to Balzac, whom he ever preferred to Shakespeare, 
and in which first we heard of Verlaine) ; and a good 
deal of art criticism. What Moore there wrote about 
Art for the Villa, and about Degas, remains to-day as 
among the prophetic suggestions by which the twentieth 
century has profited, not only artistically, but materi- 
ally; for you may easily compute what in twenty years 
has been the enhancement in value of a painting by 
Whistler, by Degas, by Manet ; and whenever you admire 
the newer realisms of our younger Americans, as G. B. 
Luks, or W. Glackens or Ernest Lawson, you owe a debt 
of gratitude to Moore's critical illumination of the way 
into the future. 

Throughout, and above all else, Moore, critically stray- 
ing about among the arts for our entertainment and in- 
struction, was unfalteringly readable. With anecdote, 
with manifold personal, intimate touches, he amused us ; 
he wrote as one having many moods, many tongues, the 
which he adapted always to his subject; long before 
Ernest Le Jeunesse and Vance Thompson he adopted for 
criticism that subtle immersion in subject, that distilla- 
tion of the very essence of the thing criticised, which we 
know as Parody. He gave us the very air, the very 
look, the very voice, of the artists upon whom he riveted 
our attention. 

And that matter of parody brings me to the slight crit- 
ical mention due Mr. Vance Thompson. If we can con- 



426 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

sider him only parenthetically — as an incident in the 
larger view of George Moore — that is but another evi- 
dence of the lightness of American criticism in any inter- 
national scale. In serious vein or flippant, this holds 
true. 

Wider though the field of strictly literary observation 
in Mr. Vance Thompson's " French Portraits " was, his 
impress on the reader was less permanent than that of 
Moore's " Confessions." The " Portraits " was, perhaps, 
half as large again as the other book; yet it had less 
life and actuality; perhaps the very lack of humor of 
which one accuses Moore kept him from the somewhat 
acrobatic posturings of the American. 

Has it ever been your fortune, as you wandered 
through the famous places and palaces of Europe, to 
have as guide one of those elaborate mimics who pose, 
always, in the very air, the tone, the attitude that fits 
the subject? Mark Twain did not show us this tribe; 
nor, as I remember, has anyone else. But it exists. When 
these fellows take you through the galleries of Florence 
they assume something of the figure of those old splen- 
dors which cover the walls ; when they discover Rome 
for you they almost wear a toga. At Monte Carlo they 
are gamblers ; on Capri they are fishermen ; and in Nuern- 
berg they are Goths. 

Well, that was the method of the young man who pre- 
sented to us, with a somewhat ironic politeness, certain 
" French Portraits." He implied, though he did not ac- 
tually say so, that he has appreciated these writers of 
young France and of Belgium, and he would have us 
know that, in so appreciating, he himself was not the 
least of the persons deserving applause. He postured, 
for our benefit, and the gaining of our admiration, in 
all the manners of those whom he expounded. At the 
end of the book it is a question whether we remembered 
most the writers introduced, or him who had been so 



CRITICISM 427 

spectacular a showman. He was like the ringmaster in 
the circus, whose immaculate ego and habit so outshone 
his surroundings that we saw nothing of the equestri- 
anism he pretended to superintend. All of which was 
rather a pity. 

Those French writers were indubitably of interest ; the 
history of those artistic movements, fantastic as many of 
them were, had to be written in one way or another. 
The English-reading world may find many reasons for 
thanking the author of " French Portraits " in that he 
brought it close to men prominent in what some consid- 
ered an epoch-making period of continental letters. He 
wrote of each man in the manner of that man ; to that 
extent he gave us a superficial intimacy with those writers 
which a more sober critic could not have furnished. Yet 
it was several pities there was so much of Mr. Vance 
Thompson in his " French Portraits." 

Gracefully as Mr. Thompson wove a hundred Gallic 
little tricks into his use of the English language — (it 
were as unjust to deny his skill in that device, as it 
would be impossible to deny the awkward effect of French 
idiom on Mr. Moore's early English) — it was impossible 
to keep patience with those vocative appeals of his to 
the reader, those " Eh, golden lads ! " and " Dear Lord ! " 
and " It's a devil of a thing to have been young once ! " 
This trick of saying " My dear fellow " every now and 
again, as if, in Mr. Thompson's peculiar cant, all the 
world was " sib to my soul," was somewhat cheap, and 
somewhat sickening. The truth of the matter was that 
Mr. Thompson had chosen to lose himself as completely 
as possible in imitation of his subjects. If they sang 
songs to their souls, so did he; if they put triple dots 
upon their i's, why, so did he. 

Whether Mr. Thompson would have done this if Ernest 
La Jeunesse had not also done it is an inveigling ques- 
tion. Mr. Thompson writes of Paul Adam being " a 
victim of his vocabulary," and of Catulle Mendes being 



428 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

the " chameleon of letters " who " sold his soul for the 
beautiful phrase." Substitute " fantastic " for " beau- 
tiful " in that last sentence, and you have the vices of 
Mr. Thompson himself — as also (if you recall my earlier 
chapter) of Mr. Edgar Saltus. 

Mr. Thompson was too much the chameleon ; you 
searched in vain for the real person behind those mani- 
fold poses ; you came to nothing distinctive save a pas- 
sion for some none too happy words, as " inutile," " Ac- 
tive," and " gracile girls." It is true that to differ from 
the majority may be a praiseworthy ambition; but when 
your difference becomes a formula it is as distressing as 
any other convention. 

Once upon a time there was a writer who declared that 
criticism was a great soul's adventures among master- 
pieces. That phrase was the making of Mr. Thompson's 
somewhat gauzy critical cloak. He could not tell us of 
a new poet without mentioning the gentleman's soul, or 
what that soul thought about other souls. We learned 
what Maeterlinck's soul was like, and the soul of Maurice 
Barres, and Jean Moreas, and Jehan Rictus, and a num- 
ber of other lyric creatures who went soulfully through 
the French and Belgian foreground. We learned, over 
and over again, the varying ways in which those artists 
put the formula of Jules Renard : " What I am, I write. 
What I write is me. It is not art. It is not life. It 
is myself." And over all the themes we heard the main 
melody of the whole book, which was that Mr. Vance 
Thompson had a most admirably appreciative soul, and 
that what he wrote was himself, that his parodic style 
was his Ego, his I. Ah, yes; but what, then, is he? An 
echo? A mirror? A manner? An American? A Scot? 
A Parisian? 

We need not deny that the field opened to us was 
new and fresh with flowers. We were introduced to many 
strange and unheard of artists, Besides the familiar 



CRITICISM 429 

figures of Verlaine, Mallarme, Mendes, Maeterlinck and 
Verhaeren, were such men as Adolph Rette, Francis 
Jammes, Paul Fort and Marcel Schwob. Had we been 
able to forget the lecturer for a moment, the lecture was 
instructive enough. All the 'Isms that rioted through 
literary France in the last two decades were discovered 
in this book. It was a splendid compendium for the 
people who want just superficial information enough to 
pose as " advanced." 

M. Ernest La Jeunesse parodied his contemporaries, 
and Mr. Thompson followed his example. His parodies 
of style were no finer than those of Mr. Barry Pain ; 
though more dexterity may be needed in mimicking a 
foreign manner. Oh, it was all dexterous enough, bril- 
liant enough, intimate enough ; but — it was all keyed on 
the key of the Ego, all addressed to the other poseurs 
who pretended that Soul and Art must be written in capi- 
tals, and only too seldom was it matter that the normal 
human being could stomach. Only too seldom were there 
passages of simplicity and information, as when we were 
told that it was Marcel Schwob who introduced Steven- 
son and Meredith to French readers, or when we learned 
that it was Mallarme who discovered Cheret, prince of 
poster-artists, and caused Whistler's masterpiece to be 
hung in the Luxembourg, and fostered Maeterlinck. (As 
to the latter detail, however, it may not do to believe 
our informant; there are far more authentic documents 
to prove that it was to Octave Mirbeau we owed our first 
familiarity with Maeterlinck. Which inaccuracy, more- 
over, is perhaps typical of the slight actuality under all 
this brilliant critical fiction of Mr. Thompson's.) Many 
of the intimate morsels of personal interest, whether au- 
thentic or not, are by no means in the nicest taste; we 
can find neither joy at hearing that Flaubert was wont 
to take off his shoes when dining, nor admiration for our 
informant. We may have known that the world whis- 
pered of a liaison between Robert Louis Stevenson and 



430 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

opium, but we cannot love the gossip who disseminates 
the whisper. 

If we wished to descend to the level of mere malicious 
gossip, might we not aver that Mr. Vance Thompson 
was a Scotchman of American experience who saw life 
through a monocle — a Parisian who spoke with an Aber- 
deen accent? 

The book was part criticism, part parody, and part 
unconscious autobiography. What it did in the domain 
of literature, a later book of the same author's attempted 
in another domain. " Diplomatic Mysteries " was not 
history ; it was not fiction ; it was once again merely an 
intimate excursion with Mr. Thompson. If you were 
genially minded you could say it was history as it ought 
to have happened to be artistic. The artist in Mr. 
Thompson had deftly improved on the actual and the 
accounts of it. Where once he had taken us by the arm 
and bade us note his familiarity with certain arriving 
and arrived Frenchmen of letters, he now introduced us 
magnificently and intimately with some of the most fa- 
mous persons in Europe. . . . Shade of Corelli, 
avaunt ! Avaunt, Hall Caine ! 

Again the snob who is in all too many Americans of 
the Atlantic Coast was deftly appealed to. Once he was 
made free of the young kings of French literature; now 
he was made hail-fellow-well-met with kings, and diplo- 
mats, and many potent men behind the great events of 
recent history. Was there not a fascination in the no- 
tion of knowing as intimately the secret motives of em- 
perors and ministers as you know, by the newspapers, 
how the most recently notorious jailbird dined last night? 
Above all, was it not an indubitably brilliant afternoon 
or evening one had spent with the talented author him- 
self? 

Talented? Oh, immensely talented; immensely clever. 
But — in more than the usual fatal modern degree — some- 



CRITICISM 431 

what the victim of his own cleverness. Touching many 
things brilliantly; but remaining rather a journalist than 
a man of letters. Nowhere, so far, is there a serious 
achievement to his credit; nowhere more than much scin- 
tillant, superficial, and infrequently original stuff. . . . 
I believe, for my part, there is brawn in him as well as 
brilliance; if he would put the monocle and the manner- 
isms out of his writing . . . who knows? . . . 

(My objection to the monocle has nothing to do with 
the average American distrust of it as an affectation. 
There is a more intimate reason. Mr. Gardner Teall once 
sent me a portrait, monocled, of a person who resembled 
myself. To my remonstrance that I never wore such a 
thing, he retorted, simply: 

" No ; but you should ! " Which I have ever pre- 
ferred to regard more as a revelation of Mr. Teall than 
of myself.) 

It was, at any rate, impossible not to mention Mr. 
Thompson when the parodic manner in criticism was in 
mention. 

As for the mere buffoonery of it, the impertinence, the 
pose, surely that adopted by Max Beerbohm — if we keep, 
for comparisons, somewhere below the giants — was more 
admirable than that of Vance Thompson! Behind that 
elaborately poised mask of wit, and that exaggerated 
egoism, real wisdom and really critical philosophy were 
always apparent. What has Mr. Shaw ever written to 
confute Beerbohm's keen jibe that " if he would have his 
ideas realised the Socialist must first kill the Snob "? 
No ; if it is to be a race to see which is the cleverer, 
Beerbohm dead-heats with La Jeunesse rather than 
Thompson, for like the Frenchman he is as deft in cari- 
cature as in posed prose ; and if it be a question of the 
philosophy behind the posturing — the Englishman wins 
from both the Frenchman and the American. As for 
mere precious phrases, what did Vance Thompson ever 



4S2 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

write to equal that sentence in which Max Beerbohm 
mentioned the ghost-tenanted windows of St. James's 
Square? "From one," he said, "Nell Gwyn waved her 
naughtily embellished fingers." 

Her naughtily embellished fingers ! What pomp and 
pageant of the primrose path came out at bidding of 
that single phrase ! The world is full of books not worth 
those three words. 

The doctrine which Moore expressed in his essay on 
Mummer-Worship he carried, some years later, into sev- 
eral volumes of important fiction. With the novels pre- 
ceding his " Vain Fortune " ; with much direct critical 
writing, and some play-writing; we cannot now linger; it 
was not until, in 1898, he wrote " Evelyn Innes " that the 
world had to admit him as a great novelist, a great critic 
of life as well as of the arts. 

In " Evelyn Innes " Moore did various notable things. 
What John Oliver Hobbes had done for man, in his two 
books about Robert Orange, Moore here began to do 
about woman ; in the sequel, " Sister Teresa," he com- 
pleted his study of Catholicism and music and the human 
soul. The book came at a period when there had been 
much written on similar subjects in English; not to re- 
fer again to the negligible contributions by Mrs. Hum- 
phrey Ward and Marie Corelli, there had been John 
Davidson's fine " Ballad of a Nun." That, with the 
four novels named just now, undoubtedly belongs among 
the social documents necessary to the historian of the 
English peoples. Mrs. Craigie showed the monastic man ; 
Moore the passionate singer who became a nun. 

Without concerning ourselves overmuch with one story, 
the tragedy in " Evelyn Innes," there were plenty of 
musical and emotional details in those pages which gave 
them permanent value for the student of pyschology, of 
passion, and of criticism. We saw a man who was an ag- 
nostic, a man of forty, attuning to himself the soul of 



CRITICISM 433 

a young girl who above all was a great singer, a great 
actress. Just as it was a moving story of a passionate 
woman's struggle against conscience, so was it the tragedy 
of a man of forty. As Balzac immortalised the Woman 
of Thirty, so did Moore here try to illumine the Man 
of Forty. Those passionate days in Paris, and in Flor- 
ence, were as near Balzac as anything in English. How 
far Moore had come from the days when he first wrote 
novels intended merely to shock the English became 
evident as we noted that in " Evelyn Innes " the insist- 
ence was always on the spiritual side. In all that story 
of a liaison, of this great singer who was admittedly 
" the most adorable mistress in Europe," there was little 
of the fleshly ; only the most admirable of artistic reti- 
cence, of elucidation of the spiritual, of emphasis on ana- 
lysation of conscience. What Sudermann had somewhat 
uncouthly sketched in " Magda," Moore made more mod- 
ern, more cosmopolitan; here was the mercilessness of a 
hair-line etching. 

If ever there was a story which the millionaire protag- 
onists of Wagnerian music at our metropolitan opera 
houses should have taken wisdom from, it is " Evelyn 
Innes." Neither confession nor the convent really 
quenched in this singer the passion which an inherited 
emotionalism had sown in her and continual mimic imi- 
tation of Wagnerian heroines had increased. With fierce 
insistence this novelist pictured the completeness with 
which this woman lost herself in her Wagnerian roles of 
passionate life. " In her stage life she was an agent of 
the sensual passion, not only with her voice, but with 
her arms, her neck, her hair, and every expression of 
her face, and it was the craving of the music that had 
thrown her into Ulick's arms. . . ." 

Grim enough stuff, this, for the defenders of the stage 
to swallow. Voicing the arguments in the essay already 
referred to his heroine here admits : " I could not be a 
good woman and remain on the stage, that's what it 



454 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

comes to." He does not even allow that the few vir- 
tuous women on the stage are a redeeming feature; even 
they " set a bad example for the very knowledge of their 
virtues tempts others less sure of themselves to engage 
in the same life, and these weak ones fall. The vir- 
tuous actress is like a false light, which instead of warn- 
ing vessels from the rocks, entices them to their ruin." 

And, as always, whether the books were labeled fic- 
tion or criticism, there was illumination on George Moore 
himself. This was sheer Moore, though voiced by one of 
his puppets : 

" I never see Paris without thinking of Balzac. 
The moment I begin to notice Paris, I think I feel, see 
and speak Balzac. . . . All interesting people are 
Balzacians." 

Though all the color and passion in her life Evelyn 
exchanged for the cloister with its gray monotones, Moore 
did not long, in his sequel called " Sister Teresa," allow 
his readers to remain forgetful of her as a great singer 
and a splendid animal. Her vital characteristics re- 
mained an inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration 
for a spiritual life. With the conflict between the two 
this novel, like its earlier volume, was concerned. The 
earlier part of " Sister Teresa " so displayed a man and 
a woman in the large, the vital, not to say the un draped 
aspect, as to give the book a rare value in a literature 
where bluntness is the exception. In moments of de- 
pression, overcome by the conflict between the sensual 
and the spiritual in her, Evelyn considered herself fit 
only for the singing of operas and being a man's mis- 
tress ; she inclined to believe the man who had assured 
her that the true romance of her life was the sexual 
instinct. Her struggles against memories of the operatic 
stage and her own fascinating womanhood — against what 
she once called " the sensual beast within her " — made 



CRITICISM 435 

reading that must have been trying for the puritans. 
But the conflict was soon ended, so that the more sen- 
sitive readers did not, in their taste or their temper, 
have to suffer long. The moral idea in her triumphed; 
she gave up the life she had sickened of, the life of the 
great world, of the stage, of men, of music, and of 
desire. 

With Evelyn's entry into the convent the book be- 
comes the most complete guide to convent life that we 
have in our language. We had Huysmans ; but I must 
not clog my argument with that comparison, so long 
the staff of many critics' lives. Elizabeth Jordan's " Tales 
of the Cloister " were merely impermanent essays in con- 
ventual fiction based on what in the conventual is most 
human. 

It was perhaps a tribute to Moore's minuteness about 
that pale, gray, monotone of life in the convent, that 
the very reading intellect seemed numbed by mere pe- 
rusal of it. We are spared as little as was Evelyn. She 
found, perhaps, the moral and the spiritual peace which 
she had sought ; but as an individual she became effaced ; 
intellectually she became an echo — where once, in all 

senses, she had been a Voice ; the convent wiped her 

brain as blank as you may wipe a slate. Here was a 
fine, a noble transcript of the fine, the noble life of con- 
ventual contemplation ; but it left the heroine as utterly 
brainless as if, like the angel in an early story by H. G. 
Wells, she had been " pithed." What had been brain was 
now merely pith. 

Evelyn, to the end, was merely a mummer. The con- 
vent was merely another stage for her. Mr. Moore's 
thoughts upon the life of the human soul were very 
beautiful; but they were never Evelyn's. 

Always it was the adventure of Mr. Moore's own soul 
in the music and the color of life that was valuable in 
his art. 



436 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

If in " Evelyn Innes " and " Sister Teresa " we saw him 
most clearly as a critic of music, and of the music of 
living, so in " The Lake " I found triumphant the old 
Adam of his art-critic period. 

In " The Lake " George Moore revealed himself, even 
more than he had done in his volumes of criticism, au- 
tobiography and fiction, as pre-eminently enamored of 
the color and value of life from the painter's stand-point. 
Great as was this novel, above all its delicate portrayal 
of Irish character, above all the silhouettes of a priest 
and a music-mistress, rose the value of the landscape which 
dominated the author. The pathos and the beauty of 
the Irish scene were paramount; his characters were as 
obsessed by it as was his treatment of the whole theme. 
It was the lake that called from Mr. Moore his finest 
pages ; it was the lake that revealed him as still inextin- 
guishably the critic of art. Here, in essence, was com- 
pressed much of Irish scene and character that he had 
hinted in other stories ; and here, matured by the years, 
was the same enthusiast for art who in the " Confes- 
sions " and the following books of criticism had so chained 
our regard. Here was recovered the brave polemic strain 
in " Impressions and Opinions." Mr. Moore was probably 
never quite so happy in his life as when his days were 
spent in arguing about pictures and painting. Never 
Was he more Mooresque than when, as in " The Lake," 
he remonstrated against the accusation that Rubens was 
" a gross sensualist " who always chose to paint fat 
women ; he averred that " underlying the voluptuous ex- 
terior there is a sadness in Rubens which only the atten- 
tive mind perceives." Which, essentially, is commentary 
on Moore, as much as on Rubens. 

Note these salient sentences on Hals : 

Hals, the maitre d'armes of painting . . . whose wrist 
never slackens, over whose guard a thrust never comes 



CRITICISM 437 

. . . faultless painting wearies one. Everything is so 
perfect that the pictures lack humanity. . . . Pictures 
of this kind reminded me too much of the inside of omnibuses. 
But his picture of the old women, a picture painted when he 
was eighty, is quite different. It is full of emotion and 
beauty. Hals seems to have grown tender and sentimental 
in his old age, or was it that he merely painted these old 
women to please himself, whereas he painted the burgo- 
masters at so much a head? There is no suspicion of the 
omnibus in the picture of the old women. He saw them 
together in the almshouse; they made a group, a harmony, 
and he was moved by the spectacle of the poor old women, 
fading like flowers, having only a few years to live — old 
women in their last shelter, an almshouse. He was at that 
time as old as any of his sitters, and the picture of the old 
men which he began immediately after was never finished. 
I suppose that one morning he felt unable to paint; he grew 
fainter and died. 

The essential grace of all true criticism is there; it 
fascinates even a mind unconscious of concern with af- 
fairs artistic; it compels the attention of the mere out- 
sider in esthetics. There we had Hals seen through the 
temperament of Moore; an Irishman's adventures amid 
a Dutchman's masterpieces. Whether directly in casual 
pages devoted to painting or indirectly in the themes 
of his stories, George Moore proved himself pre-emi- 
nently a critic of color and movement in the worlds of 
paint and tone and nature. He showed us all Holland 
in his few sentences about Ruysdael and Van der Meer, 
and Rembrandt. And it was as if he opened a window 
into his own soul when he wrote of a picture by Ruys- 
dael that had " a gray sky deeper and soberer than any 
Irish sky — a real Protestant sky. Ruysdael must have 
been a Protestant. His pictures are even Calvinistic, 
or perhaps I should be nearer the truth if I said he was 
a great pessimist, attached to no particular doctrine." 

As for story, in " The Lake," it was but his most fa- 
miliar theme reversed. The effect, upon a simple, priestly 



438 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

soul, of a woman, of Ireland — of the lake. Where Eve- 
lyn had been of the great sensual world, and had sought 
the convent, here was a soul immured in the gray pathos 
of an Irish parish, viewing sadly the yonder dream of 
free thought, free emotion, free life — and the dream, too, 
of fair women. Evelyn escaped from the world; the 
priest in this later story was to seek escape into it. Be- 
side him, always listening to the counter-calls of the 
parish and the calls of the fair, far woman, was the 
Lake — seeing all, hearing all, knowing all. Knowing, 
even, what the priest would not admit to himself, namely, 
that it was the woman who sang loudest in his soul, the 
woman who, however distant, was the motiv in the opera 
of his life, " Evelyn Innes," " Sister Teresa " and " The 
Lake " are a coherent trilogy, of life, of music, and of 
color. 

Upon the note of " The Lake " I prefer to leave Mr. 
Moore. In many ways it is his high-water mark. His 
" Memoirs of My Dead Life " was a more mature repeti- 
tion of a song called, in his youth, " Confessions of a 
Young Man " ; it was as charming, though more melan- 
choly and sensual than the earlier book. About the much 
discussed chapter on " The Lovers of Orelay " there is 
nothing profitable for Moore's most genuine admirer; 
it is the art, and not the subject of those pages, that is 
at fault ; the picture of Mr. Moore in despair because of 
his missing pajamas was too ridiculous not to cause 
laughter in even the hardiest sympathiser with his ama- 
tory adventures. What was most memorable in the epi- 
sode of that book's several and differing editions was Mr. 
Moore's Preface to the American version, that Apologia 
Pro Scriptis Meis, which belongs with the finest prefaces 
in the language, and with the finest essays on puritanism, 
whether by Moore himself, by Shaw, or by Walter Harte. 

That passage, too, in which Mr. Moore, remarking the 
existence in English criticism of certain " falsetto voices " 



CRITICISM 439 

reminding him of " gentlemen resident chiefly in Constan- 
tinople," must have entertained those who had laughed 
at what Gertrude Atherton had written in " The Aris- 
tocrats." 

" The Lake " is the book so far most representative 
of Moore. It was a fine achievement in pictorial prose. 
His unwillingness to write graceful English had often 
been remarkable; over and beyond some slight canker of 
French idiom he had often indulged in harsh effects. In 
" Evelyn Innes " such phrases as " thin winter day," 
" naked Sunday streets " and " etiolated voices " could 
be excused as peculiarities of personal style; but such 
clauses as " the world had recalled memories and she 
wondered what were they," or " the music-room it seemed 
still to hold echoes of his voice " were nothing less than 
bad writing ; while a reference to Pater's " Imaginary 
Conversations " (p. 382) was unpardonably careless. In 
" The Lake " there was nothing like that to distract from 
the sincerity of his theme, the absorption of his art in 
the colors of our present human period. 

George Moore, at base, is an artist of melancholy. 
" The Lake " was eminently melancholy. We had youth- 
ful poses of his elsewhere; the mature and melancholy 
man was most essentially expressed in " The Lake." 

It was of Moore, again, that the critic thought when 
he read, long after those early art appreciations in " Mod- 
ern Painting " and elsewhere, those delightful pages in 
which the charming M. Octave Mirbeau once retold the 
miracle of Claude Monet's find in Zaandam. 

Another eminent man of letters, this Frenchman, M. 
Mirbeau, who has given us plays, and novels, and a little 
of everything in the domain of fine literature ; whom we 
have to thank for discovering Maeterlinck, and for much 
else. Hidden away in a travel-volume of his — merely a 
story of just such a " Sentimental Journey in a Motor- 



440 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Car " as Otto Julius Blerbaum gave his German readers 
— is a deal of entertaining stuff on art, which, since it 
is in line with Moore and with all true cosmopolitan criti- 
cism, and out of line with the narrow limits of the Ameri- 
can article, I must freely adapt. 

In Brussels, M. Mirbeau found subjects for much keen 
artistic analysis, vent for much irony and entertaining 
spleen. He had described smilingly the French unwilling- 
ness to allow genius in other countries ; Dickens, they 
declared, owed all to Daudet ; Tolstoi was only Stend- 
hal; Ibsen was taken bodily from Villiers de l'Isle Adam's 
La Revolte; Goethe, without Gounod and Thomas, had 
been nothing at all. . . . Then, of Camille Lemon- 
nier, he observed that in his art he had been, one after 
another, de Musset, Byron, Victor Hugo, Zola, Chateau- 
briand, Edgar Poe, Ruskin, pre-raphaelite, romanticist, 
naturalist, symbolist and impressionist, winding up fi- 
nally, in his old age, as disciple to the youthful St. 
Georges de Bonhelier. So that Belgian, if we believed 
M. Mirbeau, had surpassed even the chameleon moods of 
Mr. Vance Thompson. 

Of the hatred M. Mirbeau conceived for Brussels, An- 
glo-Saxons may find quick appreciation. For Brussels 
persisted in talking to him or in his hearing of nothing 
but Paris and Art, Art and Paris. Wiertz, Gallais, Van 
Beers, Stevens, Knopff and Felicien Rops — the works of all 
these were spoiled for him by that persistent parrot-cry 
of Paris and Art, Art and Paris. Surely we too, on 
Manhattan Island, have often had our withers wrung 
by that refrain ! Nor is Mr. George Moore himself quite 
guiltless of singing somewhat too much the siren-song in 
Charpen tier's " Louise." . . 

But it is to the miracle that happened once in Zaan- 
dam, in Holland, that we must come; it is that page of 
M. Mirbeau's which brings him into this reference to 
George Moore and Claude Monet. 

Claude Monet (I adapt freely from M. Mirbeau's in- 



CRITICISM 441 

imitable style) some fifty years ago was journeying 
through Holland. He was undoing a parcel of some ab- 
surd stuff or other. The parcel was wrapped in the first 
Japanese print he had ever seen. His emotion, his joy, 
his amazement, found vent in wordless phrases, in half- 
uttered cries. " Nom de Dieu ! Ah, ah . . . nom de 
Dieu ! " He could say no more ; he could only look and 
look at the treasure of Zaandam, of Zaandam with its 
quay, its boats, its sombre garrets, its green houses, its 
ripples of water, its most Japanese aspect of all the towns 
in Holland. Here, inclosing his absurd trifle of a pur- 
chase, was his first glimpse of the Art of Japan, of that 
fine field of which now the names of Hokusai, of Outa- 
maro and of Hiroshige are so familiar. Here was his 
first hint of the East, here awoke the first impetus to- 
ward the development of his own art, the art that now 
so many attempt with results so rarely equal to his. 

M. Mirbeau figured for us Monet's sensations toward 
that unknown little grocer, who was doing up his dime's 
worth of coffee, or what not, in these glorious specimens 
of Oriental art. Monet, though then by no means rich, 
resolved to buy every single one of the masterpieces 
which the grocery-shop held. He watched the grocer, 
serving an old woman, seize one of the precious leaves. 
. . . He flung himself forward ; " No, no, . . .'* 
he cried, " I'll buy that ... all of them, all 
. . . . ! " The grocer, good man, thought to humor 
this eccentric; these bits of colored paper had cost him 
nothing; as one gives a bauble to a crying child to ap- 
pease it, he gave Monet the whole pile, smiling a little. 
"Take them," he said, "take them. That's all right; 
they're not worth anything; take them. This other 
paper is really much better. . . ." Turning to his 
customer, "No difference to you, eh?" "To me? Gra- 
cious, no ! " He took some yellow wrapping paper, and 
handed the old woman her bit of cheese. 

Monet, mad with joy, took his treasures home, spread 



442 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

them out before him, the first of what was later to be- 
come a famous collection, and the real incentive to an 
evolution in French painting that belongs seriously to 
the history of nineteenth century art. 

Surely that little story of M. Mirbeau's ranks with 
the stories of the same sort with which Moore regaled 
his readers. 

It would be easy enough, in considering the fiction upon 
musical bohemianism which George Moore wrote, to refer 
to that whole shelf in the modern library which holds 
the stories told of " the artistic temperament." But that 
phrase, as well as " bohemianism," is long since flyblown, 
and only in the rarest instances has good art been 
achieved on those texts. Besides the music and mum- 
ming stories of Moore, Shaw, Claretie, Bierbaum, and 
Von Wolzogen all wrote novels already named. There 
were delightful stories in this sort in the earlier work 
of Henr} 7 Harland, and fantastic vagabondage was never 
more fascinatingly pictured than in W. J. Locke's " Be- 
loved Vagabond." As Harland, an American, wrote al- 
ways as if touched by a southern, Latin sun, finding his 
chief inspiration, eventually, in certain Anglo-Italian 
effects of the artistic temper, so did Locke write with a 
Gallic spirit, a quickness of whim, an allusiveness of 
phrase which in an Englishman was no less remarkable 
than the " Quattrocentisteria " of Maurice Hewlett. 

The " artistic temperament " — the phrase had become 
abominable. When a young woman of more beauty than 
brains refused to abide by the salutary conventions so- 
ciety devised for its own health, we heard the apology 
that she had the artistic temperament. The modern Ger- 
mans, leaning more and more toward Paris, even dropped 
half the phrase; when they see one of Beauty's daughters 
making straight down the primrose path they say simply 
that she has " temperament. . . ." When a ne'er-do- 



CRITICISM 443 

well eluded sobriety and his creditors ; he had the artistic 
temperament. . . . True, all true, and yet, when a 
great artist touched the words, how they glowed! When 
Locke's " Beloved Vagabond " was drunken, we thought 
of the drunken yet ever noble Charles Lamb ; when he 
assumed a Verlainesque mantle as dictator of a cafe where 
arts and isms were in the air and the smoke, it was yet 
never of a Verlaine's vices that we thought. Here, on 
page after page, was the artistic temperament made so 
charming that one almost forgave the many sins com- 
mitted in its. name. ... It came, as always, to the 
art with which the thing was done. Always, in thinking 
of great works of art this is brought home to me: 

The moment you can put your finger, or your phrase, 
definitely upon a work of art, that moment it loses some- 
thing of its interest. If the charm of the thing is so defi- 
nite that a critic can put it into this or that gallery, 
can classify it, catalogue it, or can even reproduce or 
hint its quality, then it has, for the most sensitive, too 
hard a glitter. We agree with Richard Realf that it is 
the subtle suggestion of the flowers and the children that 
is fairer than the flowers and the children themselves ; in- 
direction appeals more sharply than bluntness. 

Have our American students of the arts, then, had any 
critic who upon the arts of music, of the theatre, and even 
upon the artistic temperament, has done anything at all 
comparable with that of George Moore? 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 

If it was not James Huneker, it was certainly no other. 
He alone, in America, made the subject of music (which 
in foreign fiction had ranged all the way from the sugar 
of " The First Violin " to the strong meat in " Evelyn 
Innes ") fascinating to the general reader. He alone, 
indeed, attempted comprehension of all the arts in his 
criticism. He alone, as to sheer bulk upon our shelves, 
and as to anything like general public recognition, is 
comparable with our two Irish critics, Moore and Shaw. 
If it is Moore, and music, that have brought us to Mr. 
Huneker, in this present review, the latter's career as 
critic touches Shaw's at many points. Shaw began with 
paint, turning next to music, and then to the theatre, 
and making literature always. Huneker began, I think, 
with the theatre, and turned to music; reverted again to 
the theatre; and is now active in art-criticism, though 
nothing of his in that sort is so far between covers. In 
literature of any permanence, it was as a writer on music 
that he first made impression, and that is still his para- 
mount virtue, versatile though he has been in other di- 
rections. 

Essentially and primarily Mr. Huneker fulfilled the re- 
quirement of being intrinsically readable. Whether on 
music, the theatre, literature or paint, he is always read- 
able. He is as unable to write badly as most others are 
to write well. In result we have him as the one critical 
artist who ranks internationally. Each succeeding book 
of his more firmly fixed him in international regard. De- 
servedly or not, by his persistence, his painstaking genius, 
his cosmopolitan sophistications, he winged to a point 
where he is the one champion we can put into the lists 
against the outlanders. 



CRITICISM 445 

Reading Mr. Huneker was to realise that even to an 
American critic there were still possible adventures among 
masterpieces. Contemplation of our own arts seldom 
brought likelihood of either the adventure or the master- 
piece; little seemed visible save a plateau of mediocrity 
entirely surrounded by money. Fortunate was the critical 
soul who could wing to where the masterpieces were, 
could adventure in that rarer air, and return to tell us 
of his discoveries, his fine moments and his exquisite 
emotions. Fortunate were we to have such a critical 
soul among us. In music and in drama Mr. Huneker 
guided us into paths that stimulated our intelligence, 
widened our delights. But, this must be pointed out: 
widening our outlook and his own renown internationally, 
he achieved that by working almost exclusively in exotic 
fields. He became a cosmopolitan critic, ranking near 
the other giants abroad; but he is hardly in anything an 
American. Neither the American subject, nor the Ameri- 
can treatment, nor the American viewpoint is there. 
What he has done for the broadening of our appreciation 
in the drama never had half as much actual American 
application as did Mr. Nirdlinger's single volume. 

Mr. Nirdlinger dealt with playwright, player and play- 
goer; he did not disdain the actual atmosphere of the 
American theatre; Mr. Huneker took us always into the 
merely literary and foreign air. . . . 

A cosmopolitan, who happened to live in America. But 
who was not, primarily, interested in American art. As 
it was said of the genius of Poe, he only " happened to be 
an American " ; there is no intrinsic evidence in his work 
to prove him of this country or of that. Note what he 
has written about, as the title-pages of his books show: 

Chopin, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, Richard Strauss, Liszt, 
Wagner, Verdi, Balzac, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Turgenieff, 
Ibsen, Strindberg, Becque, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Her- 
vieu, Gorky, Duse, D'Annunzio, Maeterlinck, Bernard 
Shaw. 



446 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Do you find anything American there? 

So much for his directly critical volumes. As to his 
volumes of stories — all studies in musical or otherwise ar- 
tistic temperaments — note these titles : 

" A Son of Liszt, a Chopin of the Gutter, Isolde's 
Mother, An Ibsen Girl, Tannhauser's Choice, Hundling's 
Wife, Siegfried's Death, The Woman Who Loved 
Chopin. . . ." 

And when you go beyond mere titles, and examine the 
texture of those tales whose titles disclose nothing, you 
will find neither milieu, nor characters, nor treatment that 
is American ; it is all exotic, all cosmopolitan. But a 
cosmopolitanism into which enters less of American than 
of any other art. We move in a welter of the foreign ; 
foreign giants, foreign scenes, and foreign attitudes con- 
front us ; there is hardly a stroke of the pen that has 
not its exotic significance. 

Was not that, perhaps, one of the secrets of his suc- 
cess? For, as we have seen, in the general recognition 
he does actually, successfully, represent that American 
dodo-bird, the critic. Surveying, with proper critical 
philosophy, the world he would live and work in, may he 
not be imagined to have told himself, early in his career, 
that the successful — not to say safe — way pointed abroad, 
as far as possible from the domestic article? That, if 
idols were to be smashed, they must be idols as far from 
home as possible? . . . Certainly he abstained most 
cannily from any such iconoclasm, or such appreciation of 
homegrown iconoclasts, as might have brought about and 
upon him the destructive, crushing power of all those 
mighty forces leagued together in America to make plain 
speaking perilous. 

Tell, if you like — so this warning has long run — foreign 
truths ; never home truths. Walter Harte told home 
truths ; his career died of it, even before he did. Ambrose 
Bierce told home truths, named names ; had he not been 
one of the giants, his career, too, had been nipped; as 



CRITICISM 447 

it is they only succeeded in delaying his renown. . . 
So Mr. Huneker told the foreign truths. On the title 
page of one of his books he even put the line from Max 
Stirner: "My truth is the truth." Two of his dedica- 
tions ran to Remy de Gourmont, and Richard Strauss. He 
chose rank with the great cosmopolitans among the 
critics, with Georg Brandes or Arthur Symons ; though 
he seldom, even for comparison, harked homeward as 
often as they. Symons studied the literature of France, 
but of England also ; perhaps my memory betrays me — 
and I cannot at this sitting re-read all those many de- 
lightful critical pages of his — but I do not think that in 
reading the complete volumes of Mr. Huneker you will 
become aware of any American art at all, — unless it be 
that of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Baudelaire translated. 
Even in that detail, you see, quite the cosmopolitan; our 
friends overseas have seldom considered any other Ameri- 
can than Poe fit for the international Olympiad. 

Well, all this prevision of Mr. Huneker's was well 
grounded. Aside from the canniness in the adoption of 
this scheme of criticism, aside from the equation of per- 
sonal success involved, he was quite right in his survey 
of the home field ; there were not enough creative giants 
here to make brilliant criticism worth while. Our facts, 
in this detail, went somewhat in the face of Henry James's 
dictum that only as a society becomes older, can it be 
critical; Mr. Huneker found his subjects abroad, but de- 
veloped about them so brilliant a critical spirit as to 
shed more intellectual illumination than did the creative 
art of his compatriot contemporaries. 

If there was something of compromise, something of 
the Jesuit's reasoning, in this choice of criticism, we who 
read are still the gainers. Why run, the very first time 
round, full tilt into the windmills, smash the immediate 
nearby idols, denounce familiar shams — why make, in 
short, enemies — and so hamper a career that might be 
of real value to the community? Was not discretion the 



448 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

critic's better part? Discretion, and the far-sighted 
vision? Surely, surely. So, gratefully enough, we may 
conceive Mr. Huneker seeing things as they were, mur- 
muring softly to himself : " Ich kenne meine Pappen- 
heimer ! " and entering the international, rather than the 
American, arena? 

But the question opens too widely. We come to the 
comparison between all the arts, creative and critical, — 
whether what is fittest to survive is the art which smacks 
of the soil, or that which is simply art irrespective of geo-' 
graphical, racial or linguistic boundaries. . . . 
Which is too interminable a discussion. Let us, like 
Machiavelli and Mr. Huneker, take things as they are; 
let us consider those many fine pages in illuminative crit- 
ical interpretation which he has given us. 

He had, above all else, the rare, the happy gift of 
illuminating all he put his pen to. If there is one belief 
of my own that is almost a dogma with me, it is that 
the province of the writer is to interest, be he novelist, 
poet or critic. If you cannot get yourself read, of what 
value is your lore, your idea, your truth? That quality 
of readability is precisely the rarest among critics. It 
was for their eminent readability that those three Irish- 
men always seemed to me the paramount craftsmen of 
our time, the real Three Musketeers from Ireland. 
Mr. Huneker combined gracefully technical skill and lore 
with a prose that immediately commanded attention. 

His first considerable volume, that on Chopin, had the 
air of being a book on the right man by the right man. 
In his interpretation of the soul and the work of Chopin, 
he gave us much of himself; on every one of those pages 
was some touch proving it a labor of love. " Chopin : 
The Man and His Music " provided notably sympathetic 
insight into the character of that musician, and into the 
circumstances and qualities which moulded his work. The 
critic did his best to blow away illusions about the com- 



CRITICISM 449 

poser's effeminacy, declaring his brain " masculine, elec- 
tric, and his soul courageous," and pointing out that " in 
Chopin's early days the Byronic pose, the grandiose and 
the horrible prevailed — witness the pictures of Ingres 
and Delacroix; and Richter wrote with his heart- 
strings saturated in moonshine and tears. Chopin did 
not altogether escape the artistic vices of his genera- 
tion." 

Pungent, polished pages came as easily from this 
critic, as bombast from the majority; if at times he in- 
dulged in the cryptic, even that disclosed the surplus in 
him of an original vigor. Knowing nothing of the tech- 
nics of music, you were able to read this man's musical 
criticisms as interestedly as if a great romantic novelist 
had you spellbound. 

Upon the " Chopin " there followed several volumes of 
musical essays and stories. Though against some of the 
stories (as, for example, the volume called "Melomani- 
acs ") could be brought the accusation that the style 
tended needlessly toward exotic syllables, in the main 
these books were the first which for technical understanding 
or for general entertainment were at all in the class with 
such work as Walter Pater's " Appreciations " or George 
Moore's " Impressions and Opinions " and his novels on 
music. This stuff of Huneker's was compact of both 
musical lore and a musical style. If his stories had some- 
times too much the air of fantastic essays in criticism of 
the artistic temperament — if they were too easily em- 
ployed by the intellectual snobs who hunger for strange 
creeds and sounding phrases — his deliberately analytic 
essays had all the charm of well written fiction, and the 
virtue of a forcible individuality. 

Always what he wrote was literature. He wrote of 
music, of the theatre, of paint, and of letters — one of 
his chapters in the volume " Overtones " was on " Literary 
Men Who Loved Music " — and whatever he touched he 



450 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

put into the amber of his own art. It was not fair to 
accuse him of living in the shadow of the giants, since 
he fulfilled always Wilde's test: being, as critic, himself 
an artist. 

One feature that no observer can fail to remark about 
this most cosmopolitan of American-born critics is that, 
to his universality of view, all the arts are equal. If one 
predominate in him more than another, it is music, so 
that in his system of employing the phrases of color in 
analysing prose, those of literature in discussing the 
theatre, and those of music in describing paintings, it is 
the musical phrase he likes best. It is an old trick this, 
of interchanging the " patter " of the arts ; it is not alto- 
gether admirable, it lends itself easily to ridicule, and it 
has been much abused ; but if it be permissible at all, Mr. 
Huneker's use of it has behind it the vigor of his per- 
sonality. All these tricks of the trade, all these sleights 
of technique, attract him — he seeks always to escape the 
commonplace, the hard bounds and limits set by this or 
that peculiar art — and he once went even so far as, im- 
proving upon Arthur Rimbaud's theory of the colors in 
our vowels, to invent an esthetic alphabet for the lan- 
guage of — Perfume. 

A poet — as I think I pointed out in an earlier chap- 
ter — once confessed to me that, were he able to, he 
would use another language than his own. That strange 
bent of one type of craftsman to escape from his craft's 
too narrow groove was voiced by Mr. Huneker when, as 
against the " artist in prose," he declared that : 

. . far happier in the tone poet. Addressing a se- 
lected audience, appealing to sensibilities firm and tastes ex- 
quisitely cultured, he may still remain secluded. His musical 
phrases are cryptic, and even those who run fastest may not 
always read. . . . The golden reticence of the music 
artist saves him from the mortifying misunderstandings of 
the worker in verse and spares him the pangs which come 
from the nudity of the written word." 



CRITICISM 451 

It is to be remarked, once again, that Mr. Huneker 
himself spared no efforts to keep his own written word 
so wrapped, so veiled, that not even the fastest mental 
runner could always read him patiently. Transmuting 
into literature all the other arts, he often brought so 
much of those foreign elements into his amalgam, that 
the result was nothing less than confusion ; it was all 
the arts in solution; if, behind all this magic, we had 
not suspected a bland smile on the magician's face, 
neither readers nor critic had been human. 

Though there has not yet been a volume of intendedly 
literary appreciation by Mr. Huneker, that interest runs 
well up with all the others in his books. He has written 
of the writers about music, Russian, French and Eng- 
lish and German ; he has discoursed upon the pragmatism 
of Professer William James — that Harvard pragmatist 
of the Open Door in American letters ! and there is, in- 
deed, very little that he has not included in his appre- 
ciations, saving always the art of his own country. 

Upon American painters, it is true, he has given us 
many fine and high lights ; but inasmuch as those are not 
yet made permanent, not yet between covers, we can- 
not here consider them. 

There remains the theatre. 

If we are to believe Mr. Huneker, our American theatre 
had nothing that could come internationally into dis- 
cussion among serious critical spirits ; when men voiced 
the phrases and the phases of the drama as modern 
Petersburg, Paris, Stockholm, Munich, Berlin or London 
knew them, no American name ever fell- from their lips. 
So, turning his back upon America as a source, Mr. Hune- 
ker gave his country only the satisfaction of possessing 
so intelligent a critic as himself, who could at least repre^ 
sent America among the foremost cosmopolitan critics 
of the time. In his volume upon the European drama, 



452 . THEIR DAY IN COURT 

" Iconoclasts," he employed all his fecund gifts of ap- 
preciation, his vastness of comprehension, to lure us 
critically into domains which creatively he considered us 
unworthy to approach. 

Once again he became, as in music, a guide into paths 
unbeaten by our mediocrities. Whether or no modern 
drama in America be indeed sterile ; whether Mr. Huneker 
was justified or not in neglecting it; that is not now the 
point; he certainly, in this book, showed us many places 
where it was other than sterile. His keen vision dis- 
sected for us the modern path-breakers in the theatres 
of many tongues, and the book was indubitably, for 
many readers, the first really vivid impression of many 
great figures in to-day's dramatic art. 

Whatever haze may have existed here about those 
foreign craftsmen, this book was calculated to dispel. 
Throughout all its pages, Mr. Huneker kept a context 
between the vital qualities in all those idol-smashers — 
Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Becque, Her- 
vieu, Gorky, Duse and D'Annunzio, Maeterlinck and Ber- 
nard Shaw — ; he found all these Norsemen, Frenchmen, 
Germans, Italians and Celts to be real fellows in spirit; 
it was seldom when he could not discuss one in terms of 
the other. (Just as it was seldom he could not write of 
one art in terms of another.) 

Inasmuch as a play by Becque was on the program 
for performance by the Criterion Independent Theatre 
in New York — of memories both grave and gay ! — let us 
dwell a few moments on that chapter in Huneker's " Icono- 
clasts," devoted to this typical Parisian; it was, I think, 
the first chapter of that sort for American shelves. That 
compliment, indeed, was often enough to be Mr. Hune- 
ker's due ; if we wished our appreciative observations ex- 
tended into the foreign field, he was the one who first 
seriously undertook to guide us. . . . Mr. Huneker 
presented the arch-naturalist, Becque, who died in 1900, 



CRITICISM 453 

as a gay and sparkling person, who persevered against 
perpetual failure ; whose " The Ravens " was refused at 
seven theatres ; and whose vitriol — note that word ; I shall 
refer to it again! — aimed at Sarcey and Claretie must 
have been entertaining in the extreme. Our critic in 
one line exposes, typically, and for the general amaze at 
the colossal range of his cosmopolitanism, this Gallic 
crowd ; " Becque was nearer classic form than Hervieu, 
De Curel, Georges Ancey, Leon Hennique, Emile Fabre, 
Maurice Donnay, Lemaitre, Henri Lavedan, and the rest 
of the younger group that delighted in honoring him 
with the title of supreme master." 

" Vitriol " said Mr. Huneker about Becque. Yes ; and 
A. B. Walkley wrote of "La Parisienne," Becque's most 
essential play, that " its irony bites like vitriol." The 
English critic asserted that it was " diabolically clever 
a whiff of sulphur combined with odeur de 
femme." " Diabolically adroit and disconcerting," said 
Mr. Huneker. The phrases in cosmopolis, you see, have 
their conventions, which cross water easily. 

It was in the chapter on Villiers de l'Isle Adam that 
we had Mr. Huneker at his best, and that, for the first 
time in this book, we could, as Americans, take other than 
cosmopolitan pride in his page. Upon such a subject as 
de l'Isle Adam, Huneker could move musically and mys- 
tically among the mystics ; his own unquenched romantic 
soul emerged from the clangor and the crypticism of the 
super-critic; the account of Adam's death became, with 
Arthur Symons' note on Ernest Dowson, one of the mem- 
orable chapters in critical sympathy. And here we came 
at last to an American, to Poe. Always, among these 
internationals, it is only by Poe that we count at all. 
Huneker had written that " Poe is a child compared to 
Strindberg in the analysis of morbid states of soul " ; 
but now he was forced to admit Poe as father to a breed 
of notable European men of letters. Personally and ar- 



454 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

tistically Adam came straight from Poe ; both were birds 
of the night (in the popular legends, at any rate), was- 
trels of genius. Here follows the one virtue Huneker 
can allow us, coming thereby to the identical conclusion 
to which I drive in this book, that if we have had giants 
in the past, to-day we have nothing, nothing but Money, 
and the Open Door, and rubbish by and for the millions : 

" Poe is the literary ancestor of nearly all the Parnassians 
and Diabolic groups — ah, this mania for schools and groups 
and movements in Paris ! — Poe begat Baudelaire and Baude- 
laire begat Barbey D'Aurevilly and Villiers del'Isle Adam, 
and the last-named begat Verlaine and Huysmans; and a long 
chain of other gifted men can claim these two as parents. 
But they all come from Poe; Poe, who influenced Swinburne 
through Baudelaire ; Poe, who nearly swept the young Maeter- 
linck from his moorings in the stagnant fens and under the 
morose sky of the lowlands. If we have no great school of 
literature in America, we can at least point to Poe as the 
progenitor of a half-dozen continental literatures." 

Poe, you see, always Poe. In the opinion of the inter- 
nationals, — and we can count Mr. Huneker only in that 
group — American literature has never gone beyond Ed- 
gar Allan Poe. Some day, perhaps, a twentieth century 
Baudelaire may discover Bierce. 

Meanwhile, on the note of Poe we may leave Mr. Hune- 
ker. It is as near as he comes (saving slight reference 
to Henry James, another international) to any glance 
at the art of his own country. 

We can at least rejoice that this so penetrating and 
brilliant critic is himself American. His judgments are 
true, his sympathy is wide, and the expressed form his 
critical emotions take is a delight to lovers of style. He 
is almost our only conspicuous representative in cosmo- 
politan criticism to-day. 

The critic who comes quickest to my mind in seeking a 



CRITICISM 455 

European equivalent to Mr. Huneker's quick apprecia- 
tions, as well as to his flair for outland art, is Arthur 
Symons. Many things Symons said in many beautiful 
ways. " A divining rod over hidden springs," he called 
Walter Pater's criticism, " criticism which, in its divina- 
tion, its arrangement, its building up of many materials 
into a living organism, is itself creation, becomes imag- 
inative work in itself " — a definition that may not easily 
be bettered. Sometimes, like Mr. Huneker, Symons 
searches somewhat too zealously for the clever phrase, 
as when he said of Wilde that " the whole man was not 
so much a personality, as an attitude," which was but a 
paraphrase of Von Buelow's phrase about the tenor. 
Chiefly I remember most what Symons wrote about the 
misapprehension concerning Decadence, an epithet that 
has been bestowed on many of the foreigners with whom 
Symons and Huneker concerned themselves critically ; 
the passage occurs in Symons's chapter on George 
Meredith : 

Meredith is in the true, wide sense — as no other English 
writer of the present time can be said to be — a Decadent. 
The word decadent has been narrowed in France and in Eng- 
land, to a mere label upon a particular school of very recent 
writers. What decadence, in literature, really means is that 
learned corruption of the language by which style ceases to 
be organic and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expres- 
siveness or beauty, deliberately abnormal. 

If some of our cheaper phrase-mongers would only 
repeat that paragraph over to themselves daily as their 
Collect for the Day! 

And so we come to the conclusion of our long tale of 
comparisons. Abhor them as we may, without them we 
had never come to adequate perception of the petty place 
America holds to-day in the literary ranks of the nations 
to-day. Poe, always Poe — und welter nichts! . . . 



456 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

Poe, who was above all else a great Man of Letters ; a 
Man of Letters whose like you must strain your eyes 
mightily to find here to-day, unless you quote what, in 
this book of mine, has been said nowhere else, certainly 
not by the Round-Table of the Atlantic Coast. Poe, who 
worked in every form of literary art, save only the novel, 
that ridiculously inartistic expansion and perversion of 
the short-story. . . . The novel, which to-day ex- 
presses all there is of American literary industry. . . . 
Between Poe, who despised the novel, and whom pos- 
terity calls great — and the present case of American 
literature, in which the novel is supreme, you have the 
entire vast gulf. 

If the space given the small crew who in America have 
attempted serious criticism is small, it is just what log- 
ically was theirs. If I was able to name one critic of the 
theatre ; another who ranked with the cosmopolitans and 
the all-round-men; I was straining a point for optimism. 
I know well enough that the army of outraged observers 
will cry aloud at the multitude of omissions ; they will 
assure me that so-and-so is admittedly a critic of the 
first rank ; they will froth and they will fume ; but if they 
can show me that their favorites have ever written a line 
that was not mere pandering to conditions rather than 
an effort to better them, that they have ever had real 
minds of their own and courage to speak them — I shall 
be surprised into the most humble apologies. 

That we have had no such trio as those Three Irish 
Musketeers, Wilde, Shaw and Moore, I contend. 

If this book has not proven that, if we had had such 
critics as those, our American literature might not now 
be fallen on such evil days, rank and rotten with pros- 
perity, it has failed. 

So to my summing up. 

I have shown what, for shamelessness about the sexual, 



CRITICISM 457 

the ladies did for us, at the same time that others of 
them were upholding the doctrine of the fig-leaf in art. 
I have shown what was done in chronicling the evolution 
of man as a social animal, in England and in America ; 
and what share in such evolution the item of language, 
spoken and written, had. I have shown how the dominant 
note on our side of the Atlantic was quantity, and how 
quality suffered. I have shown how, at root of this con- 
dition, was our lack of proper criticism. There was my 
Case, and there my Cause. 

And now for one last brief review, one quick sum- 
ming-up, and a farewell effort — lest too bitter a taste 
remain ! — at optimism. 



CHAPTER TWELVE 

We have seen, we see daily, that there is no longer any 
question of the prosperity of American literature. The 
bare cataloguing of the sheer volume of printed produc- 
tion is done so loudly and so variously that it is almost 
impossible, for even those persons who prefer any em- 
ployment in the world to the reading of books, to escape 
altogether some familiarity with such statistics. The 
names of our most popular authors, our most popular 
books, and the number of their readers, obsess our vision 
as continuously as do the names of the liquors, the 
lozenges, the breakfast-foods and the actresses with 
which the town is placarded. Directly, or indirectly, 
American Literature, both Preferred and Common, is 
now among the standard securities. 

Whether, to continue the jargon of finance, its position 
is the result of market manipulation, or of intrinsic value ; 
whether it can afford, without loss from its actual pres- 
tige and principal, to continue its present dividends ; 
whether what is now Preferred is really Common, or 
whether the Common is actually mere Water — these be 
far graver, larger questions, and it was into these that 
this book has tried to go. To the general public the 
present prosperity looks tangible enough. The time when 
the man of letters was a sort of vagabond, in the popular 
apprehension, seems gone. Disrepute on his part is no 
longer held either inevitable or conventional ; he may come 
to our house-parties like any other person of decent 
quality, and though he be not fashionable, it will still be 
forgiven him if he is fanciful. 

Some part of this prosperity has come from the actual 
boom in fiction ; another has come by way of the theatre. 
458 



CRITICISM 459 

$ Professors at our universities, uneasy in their chairs of 
Literature — -whence only too often they issued too mild 
edicts, the baleful effects of which we have seen — rhave 
written plays and waxed unprofessorially rich. By this 
means or that, the game goes on most merrily ; the prizes 
constantly increase. The character of the publicity ac- 
corded our writers grows more and more pompous, not 
to say absurd, until we are now as accustomed to read 
that the author of " Mrs. Patch's Wig " spends the sum- 
mer in Speonk or the winter on Elliott's Key, as we are 
that Mrs. Phil Lydig has had her portrait painted again. 
We may find, if we care for that sort of thing, books of 
portly size, of grandly glazed photographs, and of austere 
avoirdupois, which depict the magnificence in which our 
authors live when they are at home — which is seldom. Be- 
tween society and literature there is a flirtation that is 
almost a liaison ; on the one hand we have females of 
fashion depicting the life fashionable to its 'nth degree 
of mirthlessness ; on the other we have men of letters de- 
scribing the week-ends, the country-house parties, the 
huntings and shootings — in short, the imitation of the 
Englishman's love for outdoors — among our best people, 
as surely and as easily as if they themselves were in 
that gallery. 

Merrily the game goes on. 

Make your game then, Jadies and gentlemen, make your 
game! For is there not, after all, just a chance that in 
this lovely gamble, the public, that final arbiter — whether 
in stocks, in politics or in literature — may come out with 
the croupier 's cry of " Nothing more goes ! " 

After us, you say, the deluge? Yes, but from time 
immemorial that desire to catch the very top figure of 
the market, to get out the very instant before the in- 
evitable " slump," has been an avenue to ruin. 

Whether or not this present prosperity can last, its 
divorce from actual merit is absolute. Year after year 
has seen an increasing quantity of " great " novels, out- 



460 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

selling all previous " best sellers " ; year after year the 
regular purveyors of this stuff have been found at the 
old stand. We have known exactly what we would get, 
and from whom; and that is exactly what we have got — 
more's the pity! Let us not name their names again. 
There they are; you cannot escape them; the news- 
papers assure you each one of them has written the story 
of the year, and you, afraid of being deemed eccentric, 
have believed them. 

The cause — alike for this splendid level of apparent 
prosperity as for the boundless depths of mediocrity — 
we have seen ; it lay with the critics. 

The surest way, in all these recent years, to incur 
the disfavor of American publishers has been to tell the 
truth about their wares ; so much have they come to 
take for granted the incapacity or the venality of those 
deputed to pass judgment about books in our public 
prints. If you chose independence, if you continued on 
a path of scrupulous rectitude in criticism, the rebuke of 
the publishers was stern indeed : they simply waited until, 
on some fatal, foolish day, you turned creative author. 
They remembered; oh, yes — they remembered; you could 
offer them anything from " Kim " to Khayyam and have 
it refused by one of the million cliches kept for that 
purpose, the cliche that your book was " not exactly 
suitable " to the demands of their special custom, or the 
cliche stating that " our fall ( — or spring — or winter — or 
summer — ) lists are just closed." With the pleasantest 
of phrases, the most specious of reasons, the publishers 
saw to it that you remained as negligible a quantity as 
possible; your quality might be what it pleased. You 
were forced to live upon the accretions of your con- 
scious rectitude; — always supposing that you had seri- 
ously intended making a living out of telling the critical 
truth about our letters. 

You will recall how much we hear, from time to time, 
about the danger to the American theatre from a so- 



CRITICISM 461 

called trust. There came once a rival trust; amalgama- 
tion; dissension; and occasionally some open warfare 
against both their houses. During the battles the gen- 
eral air was cleared a little ; the salient truth was pounded 
into the public that a healthful condition of the drama 
could be maintained best by a free field for all. The 
public may never really have cared ; but, at any rate, they 
were told they should care. 

Who, meanwhile, was attempting a similar campaign 
for our literature? 

Until lately, the way seemed lonely indeed. Tilting at 
windmills, fighting a hopeless fight; that is what critical 
truthtelling seemed. Until quite lately, — when some faint 
signs started, here and there, showing that our dismal 
level of mediocrity was moving others than myself to 
nausea. From quarters as far apart as Franklin Square 
and the American colony of Munich, came, not so long 
ago, expressions of disbelief in the perfections of Ameri- 
can criticism. What but the other day was a heresy of 
which I stood almost the singular exponent may yet be- 
come a question of the hour, as, in the dog days, the 
ventilation in the Subway, or the expression of the sea- 
serpent's smile. If there is one thing more sure than 
another, it is that in matters of this sort we are as 
sheep ; opinions come in waves. If presently you are 
deluged with doubts and declamations upon our literary 
imperfections, I shall by no means be surprised; and I 
should take all possible credit. 

That we need such an awakening this book should 
have proved. An awakening as thorough as that which 
in Italy lit the torch for many centuries of European 
art. . . . Any sign of stirring from our deadly 
slumber, our fatal complacency, is to be welcomed. Ten- 
tative as have been the signs of a rising dissatisfaction 
with things as they are — you must never, you know, all 
the authorities agree in maintaining, disturb things as 
they are, especially if you want peace, or a quiet life, to 



462 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

say nothing of material success ! — they may still bring 
the hope that we are not too fatally mired in prosperous 
mediocrity. Feeble as this murmuring of discontent may 
be, it shows that at last the reasoning members of the 
American body literary chafes against the spineless criti- 
cisms which instead of protecting the public from shoddy, 
takes the attitude of the unscrupulous auctioneers. If 
ever that murmuring swells in volume, if ever we have that 
awakening of which we stand in such need, those who are 
now so complaisant will doubtless soon be screaming 
forth the story of how they helped the good work. In 
that chorus I would not care, for very humor, to join. 
Let us not mince the matter too fine. Where the others 
are still timorous, it is forthrightness the case needs. 
Quixotic as the attitude may seem to-day, let me once 
again, definitely, finally, declare myself upon this matter 
of criticism. Polite murmurings will not do. If there is 
really to be a cure, the knife must go keenly to the root 
of the evil. 

Greed and dishonesty are the primal causes of the 
malign prosperity of our literature. Both are national 
traits. This grim fact has been too often proven for 
dispute. You need only go to the disclosures of Lexow 
as to the police, Hughes as to insurance, and the Govern- 
ment as to railroads — even if your sense of humor does 
not allow you to forget that Thomas Lawson lives in a 
glass house. Politics, insurance, finance, and public serv- 
ice of every sort do not differ from literature in their 
conduct, here in America. 

Greed, not logic, dictated the rule, so cardinal in many 
newspaper offices, that criticism of literature be subserv- 
ient to the advertising department. The argument 
would seem to be that the public is a fool, and wants, 
in the supposedly critical columns of the paper, not hon- 
est judgments, but merely explanatory verbiage, or adu- 
lation somewhat differently phrased from those in the 



CRITICISM 463 

paid advertisements. (An argument supported by pro- 
fessors of various sorts, including many whose excursions 
into pragmatism should have taught them logic.) Nextly, 
the newspaper manager argues, or he has discovered to 
his sorrow, that to expect sound and honest criticism 
from men who are paid, by him, so little salary that 
their hope of a future lies rather from the publishers 
(whose wares they sedulously puff) than from him, is a 
Utopian dream. If you told him that by paying a 
decent wage to his critic, making him independent of the 
exactions both of the advertising department and the 
book-publisher, he might gain for his paper a reputation 
far beyond what its system of echoing the advertisement 
brings, he would reply that he did not believe you, for 
one thing, and that for another, it would be next to im- 
possible to find the reviewer able and willing to keep 
completely clear of prejudice, hopes of personal literary 
preferment, or more sinister motives. 

Greed and dishonesty, greed and dishonesty ! 

Greed makes our newspapers fail to see that really 
sound criticism must, in any reasonable audience, sell more 
books than mere indiscriminate eulogy possibly can. The 
average trained observer of our general conscience has 
long ago made up his mind that we are a people dishonest 
by choice of following the line of least resistance ; the 
argument of the average newspaper proprietors, is, 
roughly, that the given average reader is not himself 
sufficiently honest to credit any critic with honesty. Why, 
then, go to the trouble and the expense, of engaging 
honesty for the critical enterprise? 

Sadly enough one must admit the partial truth of the 
contention. The way of the scrupulously honest critic 
has been made thankless. Even in quarters where we 
might expect more than the average intelligence, the 
average standard of honesty, the average belief in man- 
kind, we rarely find belief in the honesty of critical as- 
sertions. If we consistently decry the incompetent, we 



464 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

are merely — declares the community at large — venting 
spite at our own non-success ; if we find a fine exception 
to the mediocre average and give vent to eulogy, we are 
declared to be puffing some friend or other. So, upon 
widely distributed premises of dishonesty, the impossibility 
of critical honesty is propounded by the world. Finally, 
if in a hapless career of honesty, I praise the work of 
one who is notoriously my enemy, or censure the work of 
a familiar friend, I am considered somewhat dangerously 
mad. 

To attempt convincing people who are themselves but 
doubtfully honest that one may have toward the art of 
literature and toward the public such an attitude of 
scrupulosity as compels censure of a bad work, even 
though it be by a friend, praise of a good work, even 
though it be an enemy's — that is to speak in an unknown 
tongue. 

When the easy tolerance of dishonesty which has for 
so long been the typical American attitude shall finally 
disappear, as far as our letters are concerned, then may 
we really hope for reform in criticism and a consequent 
improvement in the quality of what is created. Then 
the absurdity of our prevailing newspaper criticism will 
become apparent, and will pass away. The spilling of 
the entire supply of eulogistic epithets each time that 
statistics report a new " best seller " ; and the writing 
about literature by underpaid reporters or unpaid dilet- 
tanti — all these things will then cease. From the ranks 
of the honest newspaper critics who, under an honest 
system, and with an honest audience, might rise to gen- 
eral recognition, there might even be graduated another 
critic of the cosmopolitan type, like Walter Pater or 
Sainte Beuve. How little that type of critic exists here, 
we have seen in this book; the noise of the newspapers 
drowns him out; it is with the newspapers the reform 
must begin. 



CRITICISM 465 

That finest type of critic that I dream of — let me try, 
for the last time, to sketch him again. . . . 

That criticism, to be most effective, most just to the 
trinity chiefly concerned — author, critic and public — 
should be impressionistic, I have tired declaring. Ad- 
mission of this theory still leaves open many differences 
in method. 

There is the method, advocated by Edgar Allan Poe, 
that it is the critic's legitimate task to point out and 
analyse defects, to show where improvements might have 
come, and so aid the cause of letters in the abstract as 
well as the victim in the concrete. I have, myself, put 
that case in the brief, bald terms suitable to the con- 
ditions of to-day; I have said we needed keepers at the 
gate, not lackeys to open to all comers. 

Goethe, again, held that what we needed from a critic 
was an exposition, not of the defects, but only of the 
merits of the writer or his work. It was this method 
which Walter Pater, for another instance, so delicately 
elaborated; what he disliked he utterly ignored; what he 
liked he so lovingly tried to make us understand that he 
became in effect what Wilde called " the critic as artist ; 
his illumination of his subject was in itself an artistic 
entity ; a finished creation." 

For all these differing methods my general theory is 
still necessary; you come back, in each case, to the au- 
thority of the critic who has formulated his impression. 
In the one case, back of the analysis of defects we like 
to think of the discrimination of, say, a Poe; in the 
other case, the indiscriminate puffery of newsmongers 
leaves us cold, while Pater's exquisitely expressed divina- 
tion of another's achievements fills us with vivid pleasure. 
We must have gained faith, first, in the taste, the judg- 
ment, of the critic; after that it is for him to swing, as 
intoxicatingly, as convincingly, as he may, the incense 
of his impressionism. 



466 THEIR DAY IN COURT 

The day of the critic who enacts the part of the ma- 
chine rather than the god; who is the bloodless Jugger- 
naut bearing intangible standards — that day is passed. 
We no longer, even in our newspapers, consider what 
the judgment of this or that journal is, but what is the 
judgment of the journal's critic. If one of those dis- 
cussions on Anonymity, due every ten years or so, were 
to recur now, it would take place over the vastly changed 
conditions that obtain since the passing of the old school 
of personal journalists — for whose returning ghosts we 
should continually pray! As to those critics who upheld 
the good old academic standards, who set immutable laws, 
— why, if at all, do we remember their theory or their 
practice? Because of the individuals who wielded those 
theories, those methods. 

Turn which way you will, I do not see how you will 
avoid that circle: it is ever to the individual critic that 
we come at last. Given the proper individual, then the 
impression vivid enough to bring the critical sparks — 
and you have the criticism that has real worth. 

The proper individual, I said, and the impression vivid 
enough ; phrased otherwise it comes to this, in tracing out 
my valuation of impressionistic criticism, that certain 
critics will be at their best only on certain subjects. In 
this epicurean system of selection what applies to the 
reader applies also to the critic; the reader must select 
the critic who comes nearest suiting his own taste, for 
he will not be human if he take advice that is put so as 
to offend his peculiar temper. Even so, the critic should 
strive to ignore what is distasteful, and deal only with 
what will call out the full freshness of his impressions. 
If he can go still further, as Walter Pater did, so un- 
derstanding a subject as to expound it generously " to 
the full measure of its intentions," he becomes a supreme 
creative artist, ennobling even, it may be, what without 
him had remained less significant. . . 

And there, in petto, you have my critical faith. 



CRITICISM 467 

And there, in large or in little, you have the sort of 
critic whom you may burn many candles to discover in 
this wide land of ours. 

Meanwhile, let the game go merrily on. Make your 
game, ladies and gentlemen! The game is merry and 
profitable; but — by all the canons of art, it is nothing 
less than a gambling game, with dishonesty and greed 
the main factors. 

The single ray of hope the optimist may extract from 
all the literary tumult and the shouting of the publishers 
— easily comparable to a " bull market " in Wall Street 
— is that there are some far, faint indications of reform, 
of disillusionment. 

Only in that nope may one continue on one's critical 
way, declaring good as he sees it, decrying the base, 
striving for sympathy with the author with whom one's 
temperament is in tune, and for justice to those whom 
one may not like but must respect ; and remembering al- 
ways that one's duty toward the reading public is to 
guide it toward enlightenment, and to keep it from 
wasting its time. To convince the public of one's critical 
capability and honesty, that is the only way ; the vividness 
and the illuminant expression of one's personal impres- 
sion must tell the tale either for success or failure. Per- 
sonality, temperament, taste, honesty, and style — prove 
to the public that you "have these, and you are a critic 
worthy of the name. 

When this sort of critic is the rule, not the exception, 
then may American literature expect to catch a glimpse 
of Parnassus instead of browsing forever upon the plains 
of complacent mediocrity. 

Basta! 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Aberdeen, 430 
Academy, London, 284 
" According to Plato," 236 
Acker, Finley, 230 
Adam, Paul, 427 
Ade, George, 237, 279, 373 
" Admirable Bashville, 



American Yacht Club, The, 337 

Ammon-Ra, 85 

"Anatomy of Negation, The," 

84 
"Ancestors," 121, 130-2, 134, 
135 
The," Ancey, Georges, 453 
389 " Angel of Pain, The," 170, 172-4 

Adventures of Zaepfel Kern," Anglomania, 218 



388 " Anglomaniacs," 100 

" Affair at Coulter's Notch, Anquetin, 381 

The," 262, 299 "Aphrodite," 39, 54- 
Ahn, Johann Franz, 225 308, 355, 357 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 388, 389 Aphrodite-Astarte, 64 



61-70, 



Alexandria, 39, 64-6, 308 
Ali Baba, 253 
Allan, Maud, 69 
Allen, James Lane, 257 
Almanach de Gotha, 95 



Apologia Fro Scriptis Meis, 438 
Appleton, Dr., 197 
" Appreciations," Pater's, 449 
April, 205, 249, 317 
"Arabian Nights," 367 



Alte Orgelmann Singt, Der," " Araminta," 181 



391 
" Ambassadors, The," 205 



Archer, William, 273, 415, 419 
"Ardath," 88 
America, 20, 24, 40, 55, 61, 85, Arena Company, The, 255, 324 



90, 94, 107, 115, 122, 127, 128, 
133, 148, 156, 164, 175, 182, 183, 
185, 188, 189, 198, 199, 213, 218, 
221, 238, 243, 248, 254, 256, 259, 
262, 275, 278, 284, 285, 287, 290, 
291, 294, 300, 301, 305, 313, 321, 
325, 331, 332, 338, 345, 359, 360, 
361, 366, 372-5, 378-385, 386, 
387, 391, 394, 401, 405, 407-9, 
416, 417, 420, 444-6, 451, 452, 
454-7 
"American Scene, The," 209 



Argonaut, The, 240, 243 

" Aristocrats, The," 119, 121, 

122, 133, 439 
" Arkansaw Traveler, The," 276 
" Arms and the Man," 414 
Army of the Cumberland, The, 

243 
Arnold, Matthew, 26, 138 
"Artie," 237 
Ascot, 154, 155 
Astor Library, 296 
Athens, 397 



American Wives and English Atherton, Gertrude, 45, 72, 96, 
Husbands," 119, 129, 130. Ill, 117-137, 299, 307, 439 

471 



472 



INDEX 



Atlantic, The, 28, 29, 66, 67, 115, 
128, 154, 164, 179, 242, 264, 377, 
380, 408, 419, 457 

Atlantic Coast, The, 249, 266, 
275, 430, 456 

Atlantis, 164 

Austen, Jane, 183 

Austin, William, 257, 390 

Australia, 224, 345, 349 

"Avatar, The," 257 

"Awakening, The," 40, 41, 45 

" Baccarat," 29-33 

Bagot, Richard, 105, 179 

Bahr, Herman, 301 

Baker, George F., 359 

Balfour, Graham, 290 

" Ballad of a Nun, The," 432 

" Ballad of Reading Gaol, The," 

347, 348, 365, 366, 368, 371 
Baltimore Country Club, The, 

210 
Balzac, Honore de, 41, 88, 160, 

191, 369, 425, 433, 434, 445 
Barbizon, 275 
Barnum, P. T., 102 
" Barrell-Organ, The," 390 
Barres, Maurice, 428 
Barrie, J. M., 349 
Barron, Elwyn, 275 
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 11, 60 
Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, 256, 

349, 391, 447, 454 
Beardsley, Aubrey, 344, 348, 358, 

363, 375-7, 379 
Beau Brummel, 348, 361, 362, 

370-2 
" Beauties of Marie Corelli," 104 
Becque, Henri, 310, 445, 452, 453 
Beerbohm, Max, 344, 351, 361, 

379, 400, 405, 407, 424, 431, 

432 
Beggerstaff, The, 381 
Belgium, 32, 426 
Bell, Lilian, 109, 110 



Bellincioni, Gemma, 358 

Bel-Marduk, 85 

Belmont, August, 359 

" Beloved Vagabond," 442, 443 

" Bending of the Bough," 309, 

402, 403 
Benson, E. F., 103, 147, 152, 

165-179 
Berkeley Lyceum, 309 
Berlin, 58, 60, 67-69, 349, 351, 

352, 387, 451 
Bernhardt, Sarah, 353, 416 
Besant, Sir Walter, 368 
Bible, The, 35 
Bierbaum, Otto, 350, 357, 374, 

382-4, 386-9, 391-4, 440, 442 
Bierce, Ambrose, ■Q3f^lBajM%?' 

454 

"Billy Baxter's Letters," 237 
Birrell, Augustine, 317 
Biskra, 350 
Bismarck, 400 
" Black Beetles in Amber," 245, 

265 
Blei, Franz, 371 
" Blessed Damozel, The," 73 
" Blind Alleys," 290 
Brooklyn, 198 
Boccaccio, 85 
Boecklin, Arnold, 161 
Boehme, Margarethe, 59, 149 
Bohemian Club, 274, 275 
Boissiere, 352 
Bok, E. W., 282 
"Book of Jade, The," 378 
" Book of Masks, A," 377-380 
" Book of Pity and of Death, 
The," 160, 260 
Booth, Edwin, 331 
"Borkmann," 309, 311, 413 
Boston, 239, 255, 277, 324, 325, 

338, 355 
Boswell, James, 85 



INDEX 



473 



Botticelli, Sandro, 353, 395 
Bouhelier, St. Georges de, 440 
Bourget, Paul, 29, 191 
Bovary, Emma, 11 
Bowdoin, George F., 359 
Bowery, The, 227 
Bradley, Will H., 376, 377, 381 
Brandes, Georg, 200, 301, 310, 

447 
Brahma, 85 
Brahms, Johannes, 445 
Brandywine, The, 136 
Briticisms, 218 
British Museum, 343 
Broadway, 68, 317, 396 
" Broke of Covenden," 181 
Brooklyn, 198 
Brewn, Billy, 11 
Bruant, Aristide, 385 
Brussels, 440 

Buchanan, Robert, 397, 402 
Buckingham, 364 
Buda-Pesth, 349 
" Bunte Vogel," 392 
Burbank, Luther, 176 
Burgess, Gelett, 168, 376 
Burnand, Sir Francis C, 402 
Burrian, 357 
Burton, Richard, 367 
Butterfly, The, 375 
Byron, Lord, 33, 34, 37, 39, 107, 

176, 238, 253, 305, 342, 343, 

440 



"Candide," 15 

" Can Such Things Be? " 245 , 

Capri, 426 

Carillo, Gomez, 351 

Carleton, Will, 238 

Carlos, Don, 112 

Carlyle, Thomas, 389 

Carman, Bliss, 93, 309, 357, 376, 

388, 389 
Carmencita, 68 
Carnegie, Andrew, 424 
Carroll, Lewis, 313 
Carson, Edward, 363 
Carson, Kit, 236 
Catholicism, 423 
Central Park, 24 
Century Dictionary, 215 
Chambers, Robert, 96, 148, 186- 

188, 198 
Chant, Mrs. Ormiston, 106, 151, 

359 
Chap-Book, The, 349, 395, 376, 

381 
" Charge of the Light Brigade, 

The," 260 
Charpentier, 66, 191, 440 
Chateaubriand, 440 
Chautauqua, 228 
Chemineau, Le, 357 7 
Cheret, Jules, 377, 429 
Chesterfield, Lord, 104 
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 240 
" Chevalier of Fensieri Vani," 



Cable, George W., 44 

Caen, 371 

Caine, Hall, 105, 118, 369, 406, 

430 
Caird, Mona, 45 
Calais, 348 
California, 118, 120, 121, 129, 

131, 132, 239, 243, 248, 369 
" Californians, The," 130 
" Call of the Blood, The," 163 
Camoens, Luiz de, 259 



Chicago, 70, 109, 129, 232-235, 

274-278, 299, 339 
Chicago Press Club, 235, 274, 

277, 278 
Chickamauga, 268 
" Chickamauga," 262 
China, 55 
Chopin, Frederick Francis, 445, 

448, 449 
Chopin, Kate, 40-42, 44, 45, 47 
Christ, 173, 423 



474 



INDEX 



Christianity, 172 

Christian Union, The, 243, 249, 

290 
Christian Science, 165 
Christy, Howard Chandler, 318 
Chronicle, The London, 249 
Churchill, Winston, 96, 148, 186, 

189, 194-198 
Cincinnati, 221 
Claretie, Jules, 382, 442, 453 
Clemens, Samuel L., see Mark 

Twain 
Cleveland, Grover, 354 
"Climber, The," 178 
"Cobwebs From an Empty 

Skull," 244 
Cockney, 210, 396 
Collodis, 388 

Columbian Exposition, 274, 375 
Comedie Humaine, 88 
" Commentary, A," 183 
Comstock, Anthony, 359 
Coney Island, 26 
" Confessions of a Young Man," 

369, 402, 422, 423, 425, 426, 

438 
"Coniston," 195 

"Conqueror, The," 125-127, 135 
Conried, Heinrich, 358 
Constantinople, 439 
" Conversations With Goethe," 

368 
Corelli, Marie, 88, 96, 98, 101- 

110, 112, 115, 118, 152, 430, 

432 
Cork, 219 

Cosmopolitan, The, 337 
Costanzi Theatre, 358 
" Country House, The," 99, 181- 

183 
Courrier Francois, 381 
Craddock, Charles Egbert, see 

Mary Murfee 
Craigie, Mrs., 90, 97, 111-117, 

160, 432 



Crane, Stephen, 243, 261 
Crane, William H., 334 
Craquette, The, 68 
Crawford, F. Marion, 157 
Creole, 41 

Crinkle, Nym, 298, 417 
Criterion, The, 309, 311 
Criterion Independent Theatre, 

308, 309, 311, 355, 387, 413, 

452 
" Critic as Artist, The," 368, 369 
Cromwell, Oliver, 414 
Cross, Victoria, 51 
Cumberland, 293 
Curel, De, 453 
" Cynic's Word-Book, The," 245, 

269 

"Daisy Miller," 130, 202 
Daley, Victor J., 357, 391 
Danby, Frank, 29, 30, 33, 40, 56, 

59 
" Danny Deever," 283 
DAnnunzio, Gabrielle, 45, 51, 

61, 71, 78-81, 347, 445, 452 
Dante, 259 
Danziger, G. A., 245 
Daudet, Alphonse, 440 
Daumier, Honore, 184 
D'Aurevilly, Barbey, 370, 454 
"David Harum," 290 
Davidson, John, 105, 432 
Davies, Scrope, 370, 371 
Davis, Richard Harding, 186, 

234, 298, 299 
" Debacle, Le," 260 
" Decay of Lying, The," 363, 

367-369 
Degas, Hilaire, 373, 422, 425 
Dehmel, Richard, 350, 374, 382 
Delacroix, Ferdinand, 449 
Delaware River, 230 
"De Profundis," 349, 350, 368, 

386 
Derby, The, 316 



INDEX 



475 



Detaille, Jean Baptiste, 249 
"Devil's Disciple," 321, 337 
D'Humieres, Vicomte, 393 
"Diana Mallory," 100 
" Diary of a Lost Soul," 55, 

59, 60 
Dickens, Charles, 440 
Diogenes, 419 

" Diplomatic Mysteries," 430 
Dispatch, The St. Paul, 290 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 112, 118, 195, 

361, 370 
Dobson, Austin, 383, 389, 391 
Dod Grile, 244 
"Dodo," 147, 165, 173, 179 
"Dog and the Man, The," 276 
Don Juan, 33 
Donnay, Maurice, 453 
Don Quixote, 313, 408 
" Doomswoman, The," 119-121, 

135 
D'Orsay, Comte, 175, 370 
" Double Beheading, The," 352 
" Doubts of Dives, The," 36» 
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 47, 364 
Dover, 220 
Dowson, Ernest, 374, 377, 378, 

386, 453 
" Drama and Life," 419 
" Dramatic Opinions and Es- 
says," 330, 412, 416 
Dresden, 122, 355 
Drew, John, 317, 334 
Druids, The, 174 
Dublin, 403 

Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 302 
Du Maurier, George, 301, 344, 

348, 368, 370 
Dumay, Henri, 309 
Duncan, Isadora, 69, 355 
Dunne, Finley P., 237, 279 
Duse, Eleanora, 416, 455, 45S 
Dwight, 111, 274 

Eagle, The Brooklyn, 290 



Eames, Emma, 211 

Echegaray, Jose, 310, 413 

Echo, The, 377 

Eckermann, Johannn Peter, 90, 
368 

Eddy, Mrs. Mary Baker, 150 

Edward VII, 95, 292 

Eggleston, George Cary, 290 

"El Gran Galeoto," 176, 310, 
413 

Elshemus, Louis M, 224-226, 229 

Elysium, 259 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 313 

"End, The," 379 

England, 20, 40, 60, 61, 86, 100, 
102, 110, 112, 117, 118, 128, 
131, 132, 147, 155, 156, 165, 
182-184, 198, 216,' 218, 231, 258, 
266, 294, 344, 345, 349, 381- 
383, 401-403, 408, 414, 416, 420, 
423, 447, 457 

English Channel, 221 

Epsom, 155 

Erlanger, Camille, 66, 69 

Etna, Mt, 163 

Euclid, 212 

Europe, 67, 68, 102, 106, 107, 
112, 221, 234, 277, 291, 292, 
320, 349, 350, 354, 359, 405, 
426, 430, 433 

Eve, Liane d', 68 

"Evelyn Innes," 114, 158, 403, 
432, 433, 436, 438, 439, 444 

Examiner, The San Francisco, 
243 

"Expatriates," 109 

Fabre, Emile, 453 

Falke, Gustav, 384 

" Fantastic Fables," 245 

" Father The," 80 

Fawcett, Edgar, 95, 191 

Field, Eugene, 275, 339, 340, 383 

Fifth Avenue Hotel, 311, 329 

Fifth Avenue Theater, 337 



476 



INDEX 



" Fight for the Female," 353 
Finckh, Ludwig, 384 
"Firing Line, The," 187 

432, 433, 436, 438, 439, 444 
Fitch, Clyde, 154, 337 
" Flames," 103, 148-153, 158-170 
Flaubert, Gustave, 11, 41, 60, 

160, 256, 343, 429, 445 
Fleet Street, 254, 324 
Fleming, T., 377 
Florence, 135, 351, 426, 433 
Fly-Leaf, The, 325, 376 
Flynt, Josiah, 189 
Follies Bergeres, 386 
Ford, James L., 311 
Ford, Paul Leicester, 125, 333 
Ford, Sewell, 237 
Fort, Paul, 429 
Fourth of July, 196 
" Fowler, The," 47, 175 
France, 60, 62, 106, 107, 116, 154, 

182, 315, 349, 382, 402, 426, 429, 

447 
Franklin Square, 461 
" Fraternity," 183 
Frederic, Harold, 165 
Fremstad, 358 

"French Portraits," 426, 427 
Froissart, Jean, 85 
Froude, J. A., 85 
Fuller, H. B., 232-235, 275 
Fun, London, 243 

Galilee, 65 

Gallais, 440 

Galsworthy, John, 95, 977, 112, 

147, 181-183, 187 
Gambetta, Leon, 266 
" Garden of Allah, The," 159- 

164, 170 
Garden, Mary, 66, 70, 360 
Garland, Hamlin, 186, 230-235, 

276, 373 
Gautier, Theophile, 41, 62, 75, 80, 

81, 257 



"Gegenden and Menschen," 200 

Genee, Adeline, 69, 420 

Genoa, 219 

Germantown, 136 

Germany, 55, 59, 69, 211, 318, 

350, 354, 381-383, 386 
Giacosa, 310 
Gibson, C. D., 90, 318 
Gide, Andre, 350 
Gilbert, W. S., 391, 411, 412 
Gilbert and Sullivan, 148, 344, 

348, 370 
Gilsey House, 311 
" Girl, A," 380 
" Gismonda," 353 
Gissing, George, 21 
Glackens, W., 425 
Gladstone, W. E., 97, 244 
Glyn, Elinor, 366 
God, 108, 116, 122, 158, 174, 247, 

248, 250, 252, 371 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 

90, 440, 465 
"Golden Bowl, The," 203, 205, 

207, 208 
"Gorgeous Isle, The," 129 
Gorky, Maxim, 445, 452 
Gosse, Edmond, 26, 328 
Gounod, Charles Francois, 440 
Gourmont, Remy de, 447 
Grahame, Kenneth, 290 
Grand, Sarah, 40 
Grasset, 377 
Greece, 62 
Greive, J. T., 415 
Greeley, Horace, 92, 239 
"Green Carnation, The," 148, 

153, 155, 345 
Grolier Club, 329 
Grub Street, 323 
Grundy, S., 402 
Grunewald, 69 
Guilbert, Yvette, 317 
" Gulf, The," 21 
Gwyn, Nell, 432 



INDEX 



477 



Hackensack, 224 

Hagenbeck, Carl, 168 

Halbe, Max, 349 

Hale, Philip, 374 

Hals, Franz, 436, 437 

Hamburg, 58 

Hamilton, Alexander, 120, 125- 

127, 136 
Hamlet, 325 

" Happy Hypocrite, The," 379 
" Happy Prince and Other Tales, 

The," 343 
Hardie, Keir, 233 
Hardy, Dudley, 381 
Harland, Henry, 93, 179, 375, 442 
Harlem, 84, 224 
Harper's Magazine, 338 
Harraden, Beatrice, 47, 175 
Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 100, 218 
Harte, Walter Blackburn, 27, 

239, 255, 279, 284, 287, 292, 309, 

322-327, 330, 376, 401, 405, 409, 

408, 409, 438, 446 
Hartleben, Otto Erich, 349, 

382 
Hartmann, Sadakichi, 44, 361 
Harvard University, 375, 376 
Harvey, G. B. M., 282 
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 349, 381, 

445 
Haven, George G., 359 
Hawthorne, Julian, 301 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 119, 238, 

257 
Hazen, Gen., 243 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 257, 374, 391 
Hearst, W. R., 243 
"Heart Line, The," 168 
Heaven, 250, 252, 351 
Heine, Heinrich, 107, 357, 382, 

383, 385, 387, 389, 391, 406, 408 
Henley, E. J., 309, 311 
Henley, W. E., 290, 365, 366, 389, 

390 
Hennique, Leon, 453 



Hercules, 205, 283 

"Hermia Suydam," 45, 119, 121 

Herod, 351, 356 

Herodiade, 360 

Hertz, Herr, 358 

Hervieu, Paul, 445, 452, 453 

Hewlett, Maurice, 63, 64, 93, 179, 
222, 442 

Heymel, Alfred Walter, 384 

Hichens, Robert, 103, 147-162, 
164, 165, 170, 186, 236, 345, 348 

Highgate, 254 

Hiroshige, 441 

" His Fortunate Grace," 129 

" Historia Amoris," 82 

Hobbes, John Oliver, see Mrs. 
Craigie 

Hoffman, Theodore, 261, 263 

Hokusai, 441 

Holdsworth, Annie E., 222, 224 

Hollaender, Victor, 382 

Holland, 437, 440, 441 
Holofernes, 353 

Holz, Arno, 384 

Home for Aged and Infirm 
Actors, 315, 319-321, 329 

Home for Aged and Infirm 
Authors, 315, 320, 322, 326-330 
Home for Musicians, 330 
Homer, 259, 277 
"Hon. Peter Stirling, The," 125 
Hood, Tom, Jr., 243, 254 
Hooley's Thetre, 234 
Hotel Rambouillet, 217 
Hotten, John Camden, 243, 254 
Hovey, Richard, 388 
Howard, Dr. William Lee, 170 
Howells, W. D., 94, 223-226, 302 
Hubbard, Elbert, 325, 376, 392 
Hughes, Gov. Charles Evans, 462 
Hugo, Victor, 176, 258, 440 
Humperdinck, 381 
Huneker, James, 358, 374, 391, 

416, 444-456 
Hutton, Lawrence, 415 



478 INDEX 

Huysmans, J. K., 160, 352, 435, James, Henry, 26, 93, 94, 98, 108, 

454 115, 117, 129, 130, 135, 148, 185, 

Hyde Park, 105 186, 199-210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 

220, 221, 236, 307, 369, 447, 454 

Ibsen, 283, 309, 311, 413, 419, 440, James, Prof. William, 164, 214, 

445, 452 302, 451 

" Iconoclasts," 452 Janumes, Francis, 386, 429 

" Ideal Husband, An," 345, 351 " Janice Meredith," 289 

" Idlers, The," 181, 186 Japan, 441 

Illinois, 274 Jefferson, Joseph, 334 

" Image in the Sand," 103, 152, Jefferson, Thomas, 135 

168-170 Jehovah, 85, 352 

" Imaginary Portraits," 439 Jerome, J. K., 234 

" Imitator, The," 148, 152, 154, Jerusalem, 357 

334, 335, 337, 357, 420 Joachim, Joseph, 349 

" Importance of Being Earnest, Jones, Henry Arthur, 402 

The," 345, 348 John the Baptist, 352, 356, 358, 

" Impressions and Opinions," 360 

425, 436, 449 Jordan, Elizabeth, 435 

" In a Corner at Dodsley's," 324 " Joshua Craig," 194 

" In a Persian Garden," 386 Jossot, 381 

Independence Day, 265 Judith, 353 

Ingres, Jean, 449 Jug end, 381, 382 

"In Hospital," 290, 366 Juillard, A. D., 359 

Inman, Col. Henry, 236 " Jumping Frog, The," 276 

" Insel, Die," 386, 392 June, 236 

" Intentions," 322, 343, 350, 364, Jupiter, 85 

366, 367, 405 

" In the Cage," 207, 216 Kansas, 236 

" In the Midst of Life," 238, 243, Keats, John, 389 

244, 259-262, 324 " Kentucky Colonel, A," 276 

" Intruder, The," 78, 81 Keays, Mrs. H. A. Mitchell, 111, 

" Invocation " (Bierce's), 265 136-142, 194 

Ireland, 60, 402, 423, 438, 448 Kew, 390 

Irish Channel, 403 " Kim," 456 

Irish National Theatre, 420 Kipling, Rudyard, 149, 180, 239, 

" Irrgarten, Der Liebe," 392 240, 264, 278, 290, 298, 306, 393 

Irvine, Washington, 119 Kleine Theatre, Das, 351 

Irwin, Wallace, 391 Klimt, Gustav, 353 

Israels, Josef, 373 Kneipp, Pastor, 171 

Italy, 61, 106, 107, 233, 285, 320, Knopff, 440 

330, 461 Kountz, W. J., Jr., 237 
" Kraftmeyer, Der," 385 
Jack the Ripper, 386 

Jacobites, 210 Ladies Home Journal, 109 



INDEX 



479 



"Lady of the Camelias," 302 
" Lady of the Yellow Jonquils," 

44 
" Lady Penelope," 186 
" Lady Rose's Daughter," 98 
"Lady Windemere's Fan," 345, 

363 
Laffan, W. M., 354 
Laforgue, Jules, 360, 374, 378 
La Jeunnesse, Ernest, 350, 407, 

425, 427, 429, 431 
" Lake, The," 436-439 
Lamb, Charles, 324, 366, 370, 443 
Lambs Club, 329 
Lang, Andrew, 26, 280, 301, 391 
Lanier, Charles, 359 
La Plume, 381 
La Revolte, 440 
Lark, The, 349, 376 
Lavedan, Henry, 453 
Lawson, Ernest, 425 
Lawson, Henry, 391 
Lawson, Thomas W., 462 
Leandre, 184 
Le Gallienne, Richard, 45, 61, 

71-77, 81, 299, 364 
Lehar, Franz, 67 
Leiter, Mrs. L. Z., 166 
Leipzig, 277 

Lemaitre, Frederic, 407, 453 
Lemonnier, Camille, 440 
Lenbach, Franz von, 69 
Leonardo, 351 
L'Espinasse, Julie de, 56 
" Letter to a Young Gentleman," 

23 
Lewis, Alfred Henry, 189 
Lexow, Clarence, 462 
Lie, Jonas, 161 

" Life's Shop Window," 51, 56 
"Light Fingered Gentry," 189 
"Light That Failed, The," 324- 
Lincke, Paul, 382 
Liszt, Franz, 385, 445 
" Literary Earnings," 278 



Locke, W. J., 442, 443 

London, 68, 75, 101, 153, 158, 166, 

224, 243, 244, 284, 288, 342, 345, 

347, 348, 351, 362, 363, 378, 390, 

399, 400, 403, 415, 419 
London, Jack, 374 
"Londoners, The," 148, 153-156 
Long Island Sound, 339 
Lookout Mountain, 268 
Lord, Walter Frewen, 26, 257, 

301 
"Lords of the Ghostland," 82, 

83 
Lorrain, Jean, 352 
Los Angeles, 369 
"Lost Tavern, The," 390 
Loti, Pierre, 160, 260, 350 
Lotos Club, 329 
" Louise, " 66, 191, 357, 440 
Louvre, The, 351 
Louys, Pierre, 39, 61-64, 66, 69, 

71, 308 
"Love Among the Artists," 385, 

403 
" Lovers of Orelay," Lowell, J. 

R., 366 
"Lucia," 357 
Luke, G. B., 425 
Lummis, Charles F., 215 
Luxembourg, The, 429 



Mabie, H. W., 257, 259, 390, 391 
Macaulay, T. B., 342 
Machiaveli, Niccolo, 139, 283, 

331, 420, 448 
Mackay, Annie, 104 
" Mile, de Maupin," 63, 75 
Mile. Madeleine, 355, 368 
Mile. New York, 377 
Madison Square Theatre, 309 
Madrid, 351 

Maecenas, 275, 283, 287 
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 107, 374, 

428, 429, 445, 452, 454 



480 



INDEX 



Mafia, 314 

"Magda," 433 

"Main Traveled Roads," 234 

"Major Barbara," 409 

Malet, Lucas, 33, 36, 39, 40, 59, 

222 
Mallarme, Stephen, 429 
Mallock, W. H., 40, 299 
"Mammon & Co.," 166, 167 
"Man and a Woman, A," 276 
Manet, 352, 422, 425 
Manhattan Island, 139, 440 
Mansfield, Richard, 327, 331-334, 

336-339, 363, 395, 403, 413, 420 
" Man With the Hoe, The," 263 
Markham, Edwin, 84, 263, 298 
Marlowe, Julia, 360 
"Marriage of William Ashe, 

The," 97, 98 
Marriott-Watson, H. B., 290 
" Martians, The," 302 
" Mary of Magdala," 82 
Maskelyne & Cook, 168 
" Masques and Mummers," 317, 

416, 417 
Massenet, Jules, 360 
"Master Christian, The," 106 

108-110 
Matthews, Brander, 213, 214, 

302, 303, 307 
Maupassant, Guy de, 239, 260- 

262, 347, 374 
Maxixe, The, 67-69, 355 
Maecenas, 275, 283, 287 
Medill, Joseph, 275 
" Meditations in Motley," 284, 

323-325 
Meissonier, Jean Louis, 249 
Melba, Mme., 158 
Mellen, Charles, 197 
" Melomaniacs," 449 
Meltzer, C. H., 309, 337 
" Memoirs of My Dead Life," 

40, 438 
Mencken, H. L., 410 



Mendes, Catulle, 107, 301, 347, 

383, 427, 429 
" Menschliches Allzu Mensch- 

liches," 412 
Meredith, George, 111, 135, 369, 

429, 455 
Merimee, Prosper, 11 
Merrill, Stuart, 374 
Metcalfe, James, 311 
Metropolitan Opera House, 355, 

358, 360 
Michael Angelo, 106 
Middle West, 193, 198 
Miller, Joaquin, 234, 277, 373, 389 
Mills. D. O.. 359 
Milton, John, 259, 390 
Milton Point, 337 
Mirbeau, Octave, 429, 439-442 
Mississippi River, 89 
Missouri, 266 
"Mr. Crewe's Career," 195, 197, 

198 
" Mr. Dooley," 237 
" Mr. Incoul's Misadventure," 

45, 81 
" Mrs. Warrtn's Profession," 33, 

409 
" Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage 

Patch," 298 
"Modern Painting," 425, 439 
Moliere, 91, 191 
Monahan, Michael, 377 
Monet, Claude, 352, 439, 440, 441 
" Monk and the Hangman's 

Daughter, The," 244, 253 
Montaigne, 324, 325, 366 
Monte, Carlo, 426 
Moods, 376 

Moore, F. Frankfort, 236 
Moore, George, 11, 26, 53, 94, 

97, 105, 112, 158, 160, 174, 203, 

301, 309, 317, 340, 366, 369, 

382, 385, 392, 394, 398, 401- 

406, 408, 413, 415-417, 419, 421- 

426, 432-444, 449, 456 



INDEX 



481 



Moreas, Jean, 428 

Moreau, Gustave, 352 

Morgan, J. P., 359 

Morgan, Wallace, 90 

Morris, William, 73 

" Moth and the Flame, The," 154 

Mucha, 353, 381 

Mudie's Library, 181 

Muensterberg, Hugo, 208 

Muhlbach, Luise, 112 

Munich, 69, 135, 349, 381, 384, 

451, 461 
" Munich in the Month of Sa- 

haret," 69, 384. 
Murfee, Mrs., 238 
Murger, Henri, 302 
Musset, Paul de, 440 
"Myth of a Free Press," 266, 

274, 291 

"McCabe, Shorty," 237 
McGaffey, Ernest, 275 
McGovern, John, 235, 276 
McPhelim, Teddy, 275 

Nankivell, F. A., 377 

Naples, 37 

Napoleon, 99 

Nash, Beau, 370, 371 

Nation, Carrie, 106, 359 

Nero, 175 

Nevin, Ethelbert, 383 

New England, 26, 92, 195, 196, 
198, 209, 214, 231, 242, 367 

New England Magazine, The, 
239, 324 

New London, Conn., 197, 338, 
339 

New Orleans, 88, 391 

" New Paolo and Francesca, 
A," 222 

Newport, 210 

News-Letter, The (San Fran- 
cisco), 243 



New York, 70, 95, 109, 119, 121- 
124, 128, 129, 158, 187, 188, 
191, 196, 198, 209, 275, 279, 
291, 309-311, 329, 332, 337, 338, 
354-356, 358, 359, 368, 376, 
397, 413, 415, 418, 452 

Nicholson, William, 290 

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 194, 410- 

412, 420, 445 
Nile, The, 230 

Nirdlinger, C. F., 309, 310, 317, 

413, 416-421, 445 
Norris, W. K., 179 
Noyes, Alfred, 390 
Nuernburg, 426 

Offenbach, Jacques, 101, 149, 393 

Ohio, 242 

Old Bailey Court, 362 

" Old Wives for New," 190, 192, 

194 
Ollendorf, 206, 225 
Omar, Khayam, 396, 456 
"On Diabolonian Ethics," 405, 

406 
Ontamoro, 441 
Opera Comique, 66 
Ormuzd, 85 

Osier, Dr. William, 235 
Otero, 68 

Ouida, 9, 117, 118, 409 
" Overtones," 449 

Pacific Coast, 242 

Pain, Barry, 429 

Pall Mall Gazette, 53 

Pan, 168, 171-173, 175 

"Pan," 392 

" Pandora's Casket," 386 

Papyrus, The, 377 

Paris, 39, 66, 68, 70, 106, 107, 
109, 110, 155, 191, 221, 292, 
348, 349, 361, 370, 382, 403, 
433, 434, 440, 442, 451, 454 

Parisienne, La, 453 



482 



INDEX 



Park Row, 355 

Parliament, 182 

" Parts of Speech," 213, 214 

" Passion in the Desert, A," 160 

Pastor, Tony, 321 

Pater, Walter, 26, 63, 93, 208, 

237, 277, 301, 306, 364, 369, 386, 

423, 439, 449, 455, 464-466 
" Patience," 148, 344, 412 
"Patience Sparhawk," 119, 121, 

122, 124 
"Paul," 175-177 
Paul, Herbert, 301 
Peck, H. T., 217, 221 
" Peer Gynt," 413 
Penfield, Edward, 377, 381 
" Pen, Pencil and Poison," 346, 

368, 370 
Pentateuch, The, 337 
" Peter Ibbetson," 302 
Petersburg, 451 
Pfaff's, 275 
Philadelphia, 109, 136, 220, 230, 

376 
Philadelphia, West, 84 
Philistia, 160 
Philistine, The, 376 
Philistines, 90 
Phillips, David Graham, 96, 148. 

186, 188-194, 198 
" Philosophy of Disenchantment, 

The," 84 
Phryne, 37 
" Physiology of Modern Love, 

The," 29 
Piccadilly, 68, 198 
" Picture of Dorian Gray, The," 

343 
" Pierrot of the Minute," 378 
Pinero, A. W., 40, 222, 223, 227, 

402, 420 
Pixley, Frank, 92, 239, 243 
Plato, 29, 352 
Players Club, 329 
"Plays for Puritans," 403, 405 



" Plum Tree, The," 189 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 26, 119, 238, 
257, 261, 262, 305, 343, 349, 
373, 388, 440, 445, 447, 453- 
456, 465 

" Poems in Prose," 364 

Pollard, Percival, 354 

Pommer, William, 383 

Pope, Alexander, 238, 253, 305 

Porto-Riche, 310 

Post, The (Washington), 290 

Powers, T. E., 377 

Prado, The, 351 

"Prattle," 244, 250, 254 

Press, The (Milwaukee), 290 

Press Club, The, 329 

Prentice, George D., 92, 239 

Prevost, Marcel, 61, 299 

Prim, Gen. Juan, 112 

Pryce, Richard, 147, 183, 184 

Punch, 212, 227, 344 

" Quattrocentisteria," 442 
Queen Elizabeth, 99 
Queen Victoria, 101, 102 
"Quest of the Golden Girl," 299 
" Question of Our Speech, The," 

216 
" Quick and the Dead, The," 29 

Raffaele, 106 

Ralph, Julian, 368 

Rame, Mile, de la, see Ouida 

Raven-Hill, L., 375 

" Ravens, The," 453 

Raymond, Henry J., 92, 239 

Read, Opie, 276-279 

"Real Thing, The," 202 

Realf, Richard, 443 

" Rebellious Susan," 32 

" Recessional, The," 264, 265 

Recollections " (Oscar Wilde), 

349, 350, 354 
" Red Badge of Courage, The," 

249 



INDEX 



Reed, Ethel, 377 

Reedy, William Marion, 266, 

274, 299 
Regnier, Henri de, 364 
Rembrandt, 437 
Remington, Frederic, 298 
Renard, Jules, 428 
Repplier, Agnes, 324 
Rette, Adolph, 429 
Revue Blanche, 364 
Rhead, Louis, 377 
Rhine, The, 349 
Rialto, The, 418 
" Richard Carvel," 289 
Richard the Third, 34, 176 
Richardson, Frank, 47 
Richardson, Samuel, 258 
Richter, Jean Paul, 449 
Rictus, Jehan, 428 
Rightor, Henry, 391 
" Rigoletto," 34, 176, 357 
Riley, James Whitcomb, 238, 247 
Rimbaud, Arthur, 374 377, 450 
Riverside Drive, 210 
Rives, Amelie, 29, 41 
Riviera, The, 320 
" Road to Damascus, The," 136, 

137, 139-142, 193, 194 
" Robert Elsmere," 97, 244 
" Robert Orange," 111, 114 
Roberts, Morley, 181, 186 
Robson, Stuart, 279 
Rochefort, Henri, 266 
Rochefoucauld, Francois La, 104 
Rodin, Auguste, 352 
Roger Brothers (Comedians), 

225 
" Romance of the Nineteenth 

Century," 40, 299 
Rome, 39, 82, 107, 358, 426 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 283 
Rops, Felicien, 353, 381, 440 
Ross, Robert Baldwin, 350 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 53, 73, 

353, 397 



Rothenstein, James, 382 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 11 
Rowlandson, Thomas, 54 
Rubens, 436 
Ruskin, John, 440 
Russell, Sol Smith, 334 
Ruysdael, 437 
Rye, 337 

Sahara, Desert of, 160 

Sailors' Snug Harbor, 328 

St. James Square, 432 

St. James Theatre, 348 

St. Louis, 307 

Sainte Beuve, Charles Augustin, 

464 
Salome, 11, 82, 343, 349-352, 354- 
Salmagundi Club, 226, 329 
Salomania, 356 
Salome, 11, 82, 343, 349-352. 354- 

360, 379 
Saltus, Edgar, 40, 45, 4^61, 64, 

71, 81-87, 93, 148, 175, 191, 324, 

345, 428 
Saltus, Francis, 378, 383, 385, 391 
Sanderson, Sibyl, 70 
San Francisco, 131-133, 240, 243, 

244, 262, 275, 298, 376 
Sarcey, F., 301, 453 
Sargent, J. S., 68, 369 
Saturday Review, The, 398 
Savoy, The (Magazine), 375, 381 
Scandinavia, 60, 349 
Schiller, 383 
Schnitzler, Arthur, 349 
"School for Saints, The," 111, 

113-115 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82, 84, 

105 
Schroeder, R. A., 384 
Schuylkill, The, 230 
Schwob, Marcel, 429 
Scott, Clement, 419 
Scott, Sir Walter, 258 
" Second Generation, The," 188 



484 



INDEX 



Semiramis, 84 

"Senator North," 119, 124, 126 

" Sentimental Journal in a Motor 
Car," 388, 439 

Shakespeare, 93, 108, 425 

"Shapes of Clay," 245, 265 

Sharp, William, 374 

Shaw, George Bernard, 55, 118, 
217, 236, 240, 301, 310, 318, 
321, 330, 340, 349, 366, 385, 
387, 389, 392, 394-417, 419- 
421, 423, 431, 438, 442, 444, 445, 
452, 456 

Shelley, 343, 389 

Sherard, R. H., 361-365 

Sicily, 163 

Sickert, Walter, 423 

Silesia, Lower, 393 

Simplicissimus, 381 

Sims, George R., 402 

"Sir Richard Calmady," 31, 33, 
34, 37-40, 222 

"Sister Teresa," 114, 174, 432, 
434, 436, 438 

" Slave, The," 148, 155-159, 164 

Sloan, John, 376, 377 

Smith, F. Hopkinson, 322 

Smithers, Leonard, 364 

Socrates, 285 

" Sombras," 334 

" Some Emotions and a Moral," 
111 

" Son of the Gods, A," 260 

" Song for a Cracked Voice," 
391 

Sothern, E. H., 334 

Spain, 20, 68, 69, 106, 120, 351 

" Sphynx," 343, 353 

" Spirit in Prison, A," 163 

" Spring's Awakening," 385 

Stanley, H. M., 165 

Staten Island, 328 
Steevens, G. W», 278 
Steele, E. L. G., 244, 262 

Steffens, Lincoln, 189 



Steinlen, 377, 381 

Stella, 338 

Stendhal, 440 

Sterling, George, 263, 264 

Stevens, Alfred, 440 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 23, 40, 

211, 280, 290, 323, 327-329, 386, 

429 
" Stilpe," 382, 383, 385, 388 
Stirner, Max, 447 
Stockholm, 451 
Stone, Miss Mary, 332 
Story, Julian, 211 
Straus, Oscar, 382 
Strauss, Richard, 351, 355-358, 

360, 445, 447 
Street, G. S., 415 
" Strike at Arlingford, The," 403 
Strindberg, Auguste, 80, 310, 

445, 452, 453 
Strollers Club, 329 
Stuck, Franz, 353 
"Successor, The," 147, 183, 185 
Sudermann, Hermann, 349, 356, 

358, 360, 381, 433, 445, 452 
" Suitable Surroundings, The," 

262 
Sun, The (New York), 354 
" Susan," 227 

Swift, 238, 305, 337, 338, 411 
Swinburne, 51, 389 
Symons, Arthur, 26, 301, 364, 

374, 386, 447, 453, 455 

Tadema, Alma, 70, 373 
" Tales of Soldiers and Civil- 
ians," 243, 249, 257, 259, 261 
"Tales of the Cloister," 435 
Talleyrand, 411 
Talma, 413 
Tammany, 284, 406 
Tantalus, 201 
Tarkington, Booth, 285 
Tasso, 259 
Tauchnitz Editions, 277 



INDEX 



485 



Taylor, Bayard, 391 

Taylor, Hobart, 275 

Teall, Gardner, 431 

Tennant, Dorothy, 165 

" Tentations," 343 

Tennyson, 260 

Terpsichore, 67 

Terry, Ellen, 317 

Thackeray, W. M., 29, 40, 71, 72, 

183, 198, 258 
Thames, The River, 339 
Thaw, Evelyn, 11 
Theocritus, 113 
Thompson, Vance, 309, 374, 377, 

407, 425-431, 440 
Thucydides, 207 
Times, London, 49 
Times-Herald, Chicago, 289 
Tintoretto, 351 
Tite Street, 346 
Titian, 351 

"To Have and to Hold," 289 
Tolstoy, 296, 440 
Tranby Croft, 167 
Transcript, Boston, 354 
" Traveling Thirds," 129 
Trianon Theatre, 387, 393 
Tribune, New York, 416 
"Trilby," 301 

" Triple Flirtation, A," 225, 226 
Trollope, Anthony, 183 
" Truth About Trisrem Varied, 

The," 45, 81 
" Truth of Masks, The," 364 
Tschaikowsky, Peter Illitch, 445 
Tupper, Martin, 105 
Turgenieff, Ivan, 94, 445 
Twain, Mark, 236, 276, 277, 426 
Twombly, H. McK., 359 



" Under the Skylights," 232 
" Under Two Flags," 117 
Underwood, Wilbur, 377-380 
Union Square, 396 



United States, 123, 127, 197, 215, 
243, 322, 376 

" Vain Fortune," 432 

VaUotton, 381 

Van Beers, 440 

Vanderbilt, Commodore Con- 

nelius 93 
Vanderbilt, W. K., 359 
Van der Meer, 437 
"Vanity Fair," 289 
Van Norden, Charles, 227, 229 
Vaughan, Father, 106 
Venice, 88 
Venus, Faphian, 62 
Verdi, Giuseppe, 330, 445 
Verestchagin, Vasili, 239, 261 
Verhaeren, Emile, 429 
Verlaine, Paul, 55, 76, 343, 347, 

348, 366, 374, 381, 385, 425, 

429, 443, 454 
Versailles, 285, 316 
Vienna, 67, 351, 361 
Villiers, de l'lsle Adam, 364, 

378, 340, 453, 454 
Virgil, 259 
Visscher, Will, 386 
Vivaria, Kassandra, 50 
Voltaire, 105 
Von Buelow, 455 
Von Liliencron, 381 
Von Woldogen, Ernst, 350, 382, 

385 
Voss, Richard, 245 

Wagner, Pastor, 171 

Wagner, Richard, 85, 158, 357, 

360, 445 
Wainwright, T. G., 341, 346- 

348, 370, 371 
Wolkley, A. B., 223, 415, 419, 

420, 453 
Wall Street, 288, 467 
War, The Civil, 257, 260 
War of 1812, 243 



lif 






486 



INDEX 



Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 56, 96- 

102, 105, 107, 110, 432 
Washington, D. C, 119, 124 
Washington, George, 136, 285 
Wasp, The, 243 
Waterloo, Stanley, 276 
Watkins, James T., 243 
Watson, William, 366 
Watteau, Jean Antoine, 172, 234, 

373 
Watts, Isaac, 101 

301, 340-373 375, 377, 378, 382, 

385, 386 
Weiss, E. R., 350 
Wells, H. G., 435 
West, The, 276 
West Indies, 126, 127 
Westchester County, 122, 318 
AVharton, Edith, 94, 98, 108, 110, 

210-212, 219 
" What Dreams May Come," 41, 

119 
" What Maisie Knew," 205 
Whibley, Charles, 341, 370 
Whigs, 210 
Whistler, James McNeil, 155, 

345, 346, 369 387, 403, 422, 425, 

429 
White, Percy, 179 
White, Richard Grant, 256 
Whitechapel, 386 
Whitechapel Club, 275 
Whitman, Walt, 290, 373, 389 
Whitney, H. P., 316 
" Widowers' Houses," 409 
Wiertz, 440 
Wilde, Lady, 362 



Wilde, Oscar, 26, 40, 55, 71, 82, 
90, 104, 118, 132, 148, 233, 277, 
301, 340-373, 375, 377, 378, 382, 
386, 392, 394-396, 398, 405, 408, 
411, 412, 414, 415, 419, 421, 
423, 424, 450, 455, 456, 465 

Wilde, Oscar (Life of), 465 

Wilde, Sir William, 362 

Wilkens, Mary E., 238 

Wills, W. G., 402 

Wilson, Francis, 334 

Wilson, Harry, 285 

"Wine of Wizardry, The," 263, 
264 

Winter, William, 415, 417 

Wister, Owen, 257 

Woman's World, 365 

Wordsworth, William, 313 

" World and His Life, The," 310 

World, London, 398 

" Writings of Oscar Wilde," 364- 
366 

Yeats, W. B., 309, 365 

Yellow Book, The, 55, 349, 364, 

375, 382, 392 
" Yolande of Idle Isle," 227 
Yonkers, 122 
Yoshiwaro, 54 
"Younger Set, The," 186, 187 

Zaandam, 439, 440, 441 

Zangwill, Israel, 284 

Zepler, Bogamil, 382 

Zeus, 85 

" Ziska," 103, 152 

Zola, Emile, 260, 369, 422, 440 



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Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
• Treatment Date: Sept. 2007 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 



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